Ikigai Daily
Menu
DriveMathematics biography

Sophie Germain could not study at France's École Polytechnique because she was a woman, so she sent her mathematics to leading scholars under the name Monsieur LeBlanc. In 1816 she became the first woman to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences.

Sophie Germain

ScienceBiographyHistory

The story behind the card

Germain taught herself mathematics from her father's library during the French Revolution. In 1794 she obtained lecture notes from the new École Polytechnique and sent her work to Joseph-Louis Lagrange under the name of a former student; impressed, he sought her out and became her mentor. Writing to Carl Friedrich Gauss as LeBlanc, she made progress on Fermat's Last Theorem, the claim that no positive whole numbers a, b and c satisfy aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ when n is greater than 2. Primes p for which 2p + 1 is also prime are still called Sophie Germain primes. Her prize-winning work explained how elastic plates vibrate, after unsuccessful entries in 1811 and 1813. She died of breast cancer in 1831; Gauss had recommended her for an honorary degree from Göttingen, but it was never awarded.

Türkçe oku
Sophie Germain kadın olduğu için Fransa'nın École Polytechnique okulunda okuyamadı; bu yüzden matematik çalışmalarını dönemin önde gelen bilginlerine Mösyö LeBlanc adıyla gönderdi. 1816'da Paris Bilimler Akademisi'nden ödül alan ilk kadın oldu.

Germain, Fransız Devrimi yıllarında babasının kütüphanesindeki kitaplardan matematiği kendi kendine öğrendi. 1794'te yeni kurulan École Polytechnique'in ders notlarını edindi ve çalışmalarını okulun eski bir öğrencisinin adıyla Joseph-Louis Lagrange'a gönderdi. Lagrange çalışmalardan çok etkilendi, gerçek yazarı bulup ona hocalık etti. Germain, Carl Friedrich Gauss'la da LeBlanc adıyla yazıştı ve Fermat'nın Son Teoremi üzerinde ilerleme kaydetti. Bu teoreme göre n, 2'den büyük olduğunda aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ eşitliğini sağlayan pozitif a, b, c tam sayıları yoktur. 2p + 1'in de asal olduğu p asal sayılarına bugün hâlâ Sophie Germain asalları denir. Ödül kazanan çalışması esnek levhaların nasıl titreştiğini açıklıyordu; 1811 ve 1813'teki başvuruları ödül almamıştı. 1831'de meme kanserinden öldü. Gauss onun için Göttingen Üniversitesi'nden onursal doktora önermişti, ama bu unvan hiç verilmedi.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Sophie Germain
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderScience

In 1956 the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu showed that some nuclear processes do not behave the same way as their mirror image. Her experiment with radioactive cobalt-60 overturned 'parity conservation', a rule physicists had long taken for granted.

Physicists had long assumed that the laws of nature work the same way in a mirror image, a principle called parity conservation. In 1956 the theorists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang pointed out that nobody had tested this for the weak nuclear force, which drives beta decay, a kind of radioactivity in which a nucleus gives off an electron. Wu, a leading expert on beta decay at Columbia University, cooled cobalt-60 to near absolute zero at the National Bureau of Standards and lined up its nuclei with a magnetic field. The electrons came out mostly in one direction, so the mirror version of the experiment would give a different result. Lee and Yang won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics; Wu was left out, although she received the first Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978.

Chien-Shiung WuRead card
WonderBiography

In 2014 Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician at Stanford University, became the first woman to win the Fields Medal, one of the highest honours in mathematics. She won it for work on the geometry of curved surfaces and on the space of all the shapes such surfaces can take.

In her field, a Riemann surface can be pictured as a doughnut-like surface with one or more holes, and its moduli space as a map in which every point stands for one possible shape of that surface. Mirzakhani, born in Tehran in 1977, made her name with her 2004 Harvard doctorate. It worked out how the number of simple closed geodesics, loops on the surface that never cross themselves and are as short as possible, grows with their length, and used that to measure the size of moduli spaces. She joined Stanford in 2009 and worked by drawing on large sheets of paper, which her young daughter called “painting”. She was also the first Iranian to win the Fields Medal. She died of breast cancer in 2017, aged 40, and her birthday, 12 May, is now International Women in Mathematics Day.

Maryam MirzakhaniRead card
WonderBiography

In 2019 American mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck became the first woman to win the Abel Prize, one of the top honours in mathematics. She was recognised for methods that link geometry with the equations of physics, especially for handling the points where those equations break down.

Many problems in geometry and physics look for the smoothest or lowest-energy shape, like a soap film stretched across a wire loop. Sometimes the energy piles up at a single point and the smooth shape pinches off there, a breakdown mathematicians call bubbling. In the early 1980s, partly with Jonathan Sacks, Uhlenbeck showed how to control it: away from a few points the shape stays well behaved, and the energy lost at those points gathers into small, sphere-like pieces that can be studied in their own right. Her results became basic tools in gauge theory, the mathematics behind the forces of particle physics. Born in Cleveland in 1942, she became a MacArthur Fellow in 1983 and received the US National Medal of Science in 2000. She also co-founded a programme at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton to bring more women into mathematics.

Karen UhlenbeckRead card
DriveBiography

American cancer doctor Jane C. Wright tested chemotherapy drugs on tumour tissue grown in the laboratory and compared the results with how patients responded. Her work helped move chemotherapy from trial and error towards a more systematic science.

Born in New York in 1919, Wright joined her father, the surgeon Louis T. Wright, at Harlem Hospital's Cancer Research Foundation in 1949. Instead of relying on laboratory mice, they grew samples of patients' tumours and exposed them to candidate drugs, then checked whether the laboratory results matched what happened in the clinic. In 1951 she reported that the drug methotrexate could shrink some breast and skin cancers; it is still widely used. She also devised a way to deliver strong drugs through a catheter, a thin tube, to tumours deep in organs such as the liver and spleen, without surgery. In 1964 she was the only woman among the seven doctors who founded the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and in 1967 she became associate dean at New York Medical College. She died in 2013.

Jane C. WrightRead card
WonderBiography

American astronomer Annie Jump Cannon sorted about 350,000 stars at Harvard by the pattern of dark lines in their light. Her classes, O, B, A, F, G, K and M, running from the hottest stars to the coolest, are still the standard way to group stars.

Cannon was one of the “Harvard computers”, a team of women hired to study photographs of the night sky on glass plates, often for about 25 cents an hour. When starlight is spread into a spectrum, a band of colours, dark lines appear that are left by the elements in the star. Earlier schemes used many letters; Cannon reordered and simplified them into one clear sequence, and in 1925 Cecilia Payne used her data in work showing that the sequence follows temperature. Nearly deaf after an illness, Cannon worked at legendary speed, classifying up to three stars a minute, and her results filled the Henry Draper Catalogue, published between 1918 and 1924. In 1925 she became the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate of science from Oxford University.

Annie Jump CannonRead card
Next card in the archiveÉmilie du Châtelet, an 18th-century French mathematician, translated Isaac Newton's Principia from Latin into French and added a long commentary explaining his physics. Published after her death, it is still the standard French translation.Read next →