Germain - 0 views
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If they took away your light, your clothes, even your warmth. This is what happened to Sophie Germain, born in a time when it was frowned upon to allow women to learn.
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The daughter of a wealthy upper class French family, Sophie Germain was born in 1776, the year of the American Revolution.
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reading in her father's library
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Her family agreed with the popular English notion of the time that "brainwork" was not healthy - even dangerous - for girls.
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They began to forbid Sophie from studying mathematics.
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Night after night she crawled out of bed and studied after everyone else had gone to sleep.
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When Sophie's parents discovered this they took her lamps, hid her clothes and made sure there was no heat in her room. But Sophie smuggled candles into her room and continued her studies.
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In 1801, Germain once more took up pen and paper and wrote the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss.
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Concerned that Gauss may also be prejudiced against women, she once again used the pen name of M. Le Blanc. As with Legrange before him, Gauss found her comments valuable and initiated correspondence. When Gauss discovered her true identity, he too, was open-minded about women scholars
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In 1816 Germain submitted her paper which won the grand prize from the French Academy for her work on the law of vibrating elastic surfaces.
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Sophie Germain died in 1831 at the age of 55.
