Sophie Germain

1776-1831

Background

Sophie was born in Paris in 1776, the same year that the American revolution began. She was the daughter of a wealthy, upper class family, who tried consistently to discourage her from learning, but to her credit she was able successfully to educate herself with no outside help or tutoring. She has been called one of the founders of mathematical physics and is considered to be France's greatest female mathematician prior to the present era (Osen 1990).

During the French Revolution Sophie was confined to her home. She spent a lot of this time in her father's library and despite her parents' discouragement most of this time was spent teaching herself mathematics, in particular differential calculus (Swift 1995).

Then in 1794 when the Ecole Polytechnique was founded, Sophie was able to obtain lecture notes from her friends, for courses in which she was particularly interested. She was especially excited by Lagrange's lectures on analysis. She thought his ideas were new and important (Perl 1978, p.64).

So, according to Gillispie (ed. 1970) at the end of the University term she submitted a report to Lagrange under an alias. Lagrange was so impressed by its originality that he wanted to met the author. When he discovered that the author was a woman he was amazed but gave her help and encouragement.

Then in 1804 she began corresponding with Gauss about some interesting results she had obtained in number theory. Again she used an alias to disguise her true identity. Many of Germain's early research results were contained in letters to other mathematicians (Swift 1995).

Contributions

Sophie made major contributions to two very different branches of mathematics. They were pure mathematics, where she wrote about number theory, and applied mathematics, where she solved problems in acoustics and elasticity. She won several prizes for her work. In 1816 she won a prize for her paper stating a law of vibrating elastic surfaces, which she described by a fourth-order partial differential equation. Sophie's work however suffered generally from an absence of rigour, probably due to her lack of formal education (Gray 1987).

However there is no doubt that her research is the most significant done by a woman mathematician before Sonya Kovalevskaya. Both her number theory and elasticity results marked contributions to the advancement of knowledge in those fields and have stood the test of time. According to Gray (1987) Germain continued to contribute to work in mathematics until her death. She died in 1831, at the age of 55, after a battle with breast cancer.

References

Gillispie, C.C. (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol.5, New York: Charles Scribner, 1970.

Gray, M.W., 'Sophie Germain (1776-1831)', in Women of Mathematics: A Biobibliographic Sourcebook , eds. L.S. Grinstein & P.J. Campbell, New York: Greenwood Press, pp. 47-56, 1987.

Osen, L.M., Women in Mathematics , Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: M.I.T. Press, 1990.

Perl, T., Biographies of Women Mathematicians and Related Activities, Menlo Park California: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1978.

Swift, A., Citing Computer References [Online, accessed 13 Oct. 1996]. URL.http://www.scotlsn.edu/lriddle/women/germain.html, 1995.

Written by Julie Boyd
(University of South Australia, 1996)

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