Germain, Marie-Sophie (1776-1831)

Marie-Sophie Germain

Marie-Sophie Germain

*April 01, 1776 (Paris, France)

†June 27, 1831 (Paris, France)

french mathematician and philosopher

Sophie Germain came from the liberal educated middle class and was financially dependent on her family until the end of her life. She did not marry and her scientific achievements did not give her a position in society. For Germain, the significance of new scientific knowledge was in its value for science.
Self-taught, she learned Latin for understanding Newton‘s and Euler‘s works. Under restricted conditions, she followed Lagrange‘s lectures on analysis and sent him her elaborations under a male alias. After Lagrange wanted to meet the author of the mathematical elaborations personally, her true identity became known to the public as a sensation. Nevertheless, her isolation remained and Germain never became part of the public scientific community during her life. As a woman, she was denied admission to the parisian academy and first she was also denied participation in public meetings.
After studying Legendre‘s Théorie des nombres in 1798, she devoted herself to Gauss‘s Disquisitiones Arithmeticae in 1801. From 1804 to 1808 Germain was in correspondence with the German mathematician Gauss, again under a male pseudonym. The result of her number theoretic studies is the partial solution of the Fematic Conjecture. Her established mathematical theorem, today known as the Sophie-Germain theorem, proves a lot of mathematical special cases in her time. Inspired by Chladni‘s experiments with elastic plates (1808), she worked on the mathematical theory of elastic surfaces. She wrote three papers on the plate theory in 1811, 1813, and 1815, receiving the Prix extraordinaire of the Paris Academy for the last paper.
In addition to mathematics, she dealt with philosophical questions. In her scientific-theoretical essay Considérations générales sur l’état des sciences et des lettres aux différentes époques de leur culture, she highlights the conviction of a similar way of thinking in the natural sciences and the humanities. According to Germain, universal basic structures of thought underlie all human activities and the existance of specific laws determine all actions. She demands exact terminology in all fields of science and human development history and pleads that philosophy should become an exact science.

Sophie Unger

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