MOTW - Sophie Germain

Mathematician of the day is Sophie Germain (1776-1831)

Sophie Germain was born in Paris, France in 1776 and become infatuated with mathematics at a young age. As a teenager, she spent her time reading every mathematics books available in her library and taught herself Latin so she could study the works of Issac Newton and Euler.

At the age of 18, she enrolled in the famous math academy École Polytechnique, which was no easy feat for a woman at that time. To get her professor’s attention, she submitted letters sharing her mathematical work using a fake male student’s name. After discovering that the work was actually done by Sophie, her professor was extremely impressed and became her mentor, helping her to establish herself and become respected in the a male-dominated field of mathematics.

Her two greatest mathematical accomplishments include contributing to Fermat’s Last Theorem, paving the way for the problem to be solved several centuries later and pioneering what is known as elastic theory, which led her to becoming the first female to be honored by the Paris Academy of Sciences

"Algebra is but written geometry, and geometry is but figured algebra."

-Sophia Germain