Émilie du Châtelet
Encyclopedia
Early life
Du Châtelet was born on 17 December 1706 in Paris, the only daughter of six children. Three brothers lived to adulthood: René-Alexandre (b. 1698), Charles-Auguste (b. 1701), and Elisabeth-Théodore (b. 1710). Her eldest brother, René-Alexandre, died in 1720, and the next brother, Charles-Auguste, died in 1731. However, her younger brother, Elisabeth-Théodore, lived to a successful old age, becoming an abbé and eventually a bishop. Two other brothers died very young. Du Châtelet also had an illegitimate half-sister, Michelle, who was born of her father and Anne Bellinzani, an intelligent woman who was interested in astronomy and married to an important Parisian official.Her father was Louis Nicolas le Tonnelier de Breteuil
Louis Nicolas le Tonnelier de Breteuil
Louis Nicolas Le Tonnelier , baron de Preuilly and of Breteuil was an officer in the royal household of Louis XIV. He is also notable as the father of the mathematician Émilie du Châtelet.-Sources:...
, a member of the lesser nobility. At the time of du Châtelet's birth, her father held the position of the Principal Secretary and Introducer of Ambassadors to King Louis XIV
Louis XIV of France
Louis XIV , known as Louis the Great or the Sun King , was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre. His reign, from 1643 to his death in 1715, began at the age of four and lasted seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days...
. He held a weekly salon on Thursdays, to which well-respected writers and scientists were invited.
Early education
Du Châtelet's education has been the subject of much speculation, but nothing is known with certainty.Among their acquaintances was Fontenelle
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle , also called Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, was a French author.Fontenelle was born in Rouen, France and died in Paris just one month before his 100th birthday. His mother was the sister of great French dramatists Pierre and Thomas Corneille...
, the perpetual secretary of the French Académie des Sciences. Émilie's father Louis-Nicolas, recognizing her early brilliance, arranged for Fontenelle to visit and talk about astronomy with her when she was 10 years old. Émilie's mother, Gabrielle-Anne de Froulay, was brought up in a convent, at the time the predominant educational institution available to French girls and women. While some sources believe her mother did not approve of her intelligent daughter, or of her husband's encouragement of Émilie's intellectual curiosity, there are also other indications that her mother not only approved of du Châtelet's early education, but actually encouraged her to vigorously question stated fact.
In either case, such encouragement would have been seen as unusual for parents of their time and status. When she was small, her father arranged training for her in physical activities such as fencing
Fencing
Fencing, which is also known as modern fencing to distinguish it from historical fencing, is a family of combat sports using bladed weapons.Fencing is one of four sports which have been featured at every one of the modern Olympic Games...
and riding
Equestrianism
Equestrianism more often known as riding, horseback riding or horse riding refers to the skill of riding, driving, or vaulting with horses...
, and as she grew older, he brought tutors to the house for her. As a result, by the age of twelve she was fluent in Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
and German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
; she was later to publish translations into French of Greek and Latin plays and philosophy. She received education in mathematics, literature, and science. Her mother Gabrielle-Anne was horrified at her progress and fought Louis-Nicolas at every step, once attempting to have Émilie sent to a convent.
Émilie also liked to dance, was a passable performer on the harpsichord
Harpsichord
A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It produces sound by plucking a string when a key is pressed.In the narrow sense, "harpsichord" designates only the large wing-shaped instruments in which the strings are perpendicular to the keyboard...
, sang opera, and was an amateur actress. As a teenager, short of money for books, she used her mathematical skills to devise highly successful strategies for gambling.
Marriage
On 12 June 1725, she married the Marquis Florent-Claude du Chastellet-Lomont.The Lomont suffix indicates the branch of the du Chastellet family; another such branch was the du Chastellet-Clemont. Her marriage conferred the title of Marquise du Chastellet.The spelling Châtelet (replacing the s by a circumflex over the a) was introduced by VoltaireVoltaire
François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...
, and has now become standard. Like many marriages among the nobility, theirs was arranged
Arranged marriage
An arranged marriage is a practice in which someone other than the couple getting married makes the selection of the persons to be wed, meanwhile curtailing or avoiding the process of courtship. Such marriages had deep roots in royal and aristocratic families around the world...
. As a wedding gift, the husband was made governor of Semur-en-Auxois
Semur-en-Auxois
Semur-en-Auxois is a commune of the Côte-d'Or department in eastern France.Semur-en-Auxois has a medieval core, built on a pink granite bluff more than half-encircled by the River Armançon...
in Burgundy by his father; the recently married couple moved there at the end of September 1725. Du Châtelet was eighteen at the time, her husband thirty.
Children
The Marquis Florent-Claude du Chastellet and Émilie du Châtelet had three children: Françoise Gabriel Pauline (born 30 June 1726), Louis Marie FlorentLouis Marie Florent du Châtelet
Louis Marie Florent de Lomont d'Haraucourt, duke of Châtelet , was a French army officer, nobleman and diplomat. He served as governor of Semur-en-Auxois in Burgundy. He was guillotined in 1793 aged 66...
(born 20 November 1727), and Victor-Esprit (born 11 April 1733). Victor-Esprit died as a toddler in late summer 1734, likely the last Sunday in August.In 1749 Émilie du Châtelet gave birth to Stanislas-Adélaïde Du Châtelet (daughter of Jean François de Saint-Lambert
Jean François de Saint-Lambert
Jean François de Saint-Lambert was a French poet and military officer, but he is most remembered for his involvement in two love affairs....
). She was born on 4 September 1749. The infant died in Lunéville on 6 May 1751.
Resumption of studies
In 1733, at the age of 26, du Châtelet resumed her mathematical studies. Initially, she was tutored in algebra and calculus by Moreau de Maupertuis, a member of the Academy of Sciences. Although mathematics was not his forte, Maupertuis had received a solid education from Johann BernoulliJohann Bernoulli
Johann Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family...
, who also taught Leonhard Euler
Leonhard Euler
Leonhard Euler was a pioneering Swiss mathematician and physicist. He made important discoveries in fields as diverse as infinitesimal calculus and graph theory. He also introduced much of the modern mathematical terminology and notation, particularly for mathematical analysis, such as the notion...
. By 1735, however, du Châtelet had turned for her mathematical training to Alexis Clairaut, a mathematical prodigy known best for Clairaut's equation and Clairaut's theorem
Clairaut's theorem
Clairaut's theorem, published in 1743 by Alexis Claude Clairaut in his Théorie de la figure de la terre, tirée des principes de l'hydrostatique, synthesized physical and geodetic evidence that the Earth is an oblate rotational ellipsoid. It is a general mathematical law applying to spheroids of...
.
Relationship with Voltaire
Du Châtelet invited Voltaire to live in her country house at Cirey-sur-Blaise
Cirey-sur-Blaise
Cirey-sur-Blaise is a commune in the Haute-Marne department in north-eastern France.-See also:*Communes of the Haute-Marne department...
in Haute-Marne
Haute-Marne
Haute-Marne is a department in the northeast of France named after the Marne River.-History:Haute-Marne is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on March 4, 1790...
, northeastern France, and he became her long-time companion (under the eyes of her tolerant husband). There she studied physics and mathematics and published scientific articles and translations. To judge from Voltaire's letters to friends and their commentaries on each other's work, they lived together with great mutual liking and respect.
Final pregnancy and death
Jean François de Saint-Lambert
Jean François de Saint-Lambert was a French poet and military officer, but he is most remembered for his involvement in two love affairs....
and became pregnant. In a letter to a friend, she confided her fears that she would not survive her pregnancy. On the night of 3 September 1749, she gave birth to a daughter, Stanislas-Adélaïde, but died a week later from a pulmonary embolism
Embolism
In medicine, an embolism is the event of lodging of an embolus into a narrow capillary vessel of an arterial bed which causes a blockage in a distant part of the body.Embolization is...
at the age of 42. Her daughter died roughly eighteen months later.
Heat and light
In 1737, Châtelet published a paper entitled Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu, based upon her research into the science of fire, that predicted what is today known as infrared radiationInfrared
Infrared light is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength longer than that of visible light, measured from the nominal edge of visible red light at 0.74 micrometres , and extending conventionally to 300 µm...
and the nature of light.
Institutions de Physique
Her book Institutions de Physique (“Lessons in Physics”) appeared in 1740; it was presented as a review of new ideas in science and philosophy to be studied by her thirteen-year-old son, but it incorporated and sought to reconcile complex ideas from the leading thinkers of the time.Advocacy of kinetic energy
In it, she combined the theories of Gottfried LeibnizGottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher and mathematician. He wrote in different languages, primarily in Latin , French and German ....
and the practical observations of Willem 's Gravesande
Willem 's Gravesande
Willem Jacob 's Gravesande was a Dutch philosopher and mathematician.-Life:Born in 's-Hertogenbosch, he studied law in Leiden and wrote a thesis on suicide. He was praised by John Bernoulli when he published his book Essai de perspective. In 1715, he visited London and King George I. He became a...
to show that the energy of a moving object
Kinetic energy
The kinetic energy of an object is the energy which it possesses due to its motion.It is defined as the work needed to accelerate a body of a given mass from rest to its stated velocity. Having gained this energy during its acceleration, the body maintains this kinetic energy unless its speed changes...
is proportional not to its velocity, as had previously been believed by Newton, Voltaire and others, but to the square of its velocity. (In classical physics
Classical physics
What "classical physics" refers to depends on the context. When discussing special relativity, it refers to the Newtonian physics which preceded relativity, i.e. the branches of physics based on principles developed before the rise of relativity and quantum mechanics...
, the correct formula is Ek = mv², where Ek is the kinetic energy of an object, m its mass
Mass
Mass can be defined as a quantitive measure of the resistance an object has to change in its velocity.In physics, mass commonly refers to any of the following three properties of matter, which have been shown experimentally to be equivalent:...
and v its velocity.)
Translation and commentary on Newton's Principia
In 1749, the year of her death, she completed the work regarded as her outstanding achievement: her translation into French, with her commentary, of Newton’s Principia MathematicaPhilosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Latin for "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy", often referred to as simply the Principia, is a work in three books by Sir Isaac Newton, first published 5 July 1687. Newton also published two further editions, in 1713 and 1726...
, including her derivation of the notion of conservation of energy
Conservation of energy
The nineteenth century law of conservation of energy is a law of physics. It states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. The total energy is said to be conserved over time...
from its principles of mechanics. Published ten years after her death, today du Châtelet's translation of Principia Mathematica is still the standard translation of the work into French.
Development of financial derivatives
Much later in life, she once lost 84,000 francs (the equivalent of over US$1,000,000 in 2009)—some of it borrowed—in one evening at the table at the court of Fontainebleau, to card cheats. To quickly raise the money to pay back her huge debts, she devised an ingenious financing arrangement similar to modern derivativesDerivative (finance)
A derivative instrument is a contract between two parties that specifies conditions—in particular, dates and the resulting values of the underlying variables—under which payments, or payoffs, are to be made between the parties.Under U.S...
, whereby she paid tax collectors a fairly low sum for the right to their future earnings (they were allowed to keep a portion of the taxes they collected for the King), and promised to pay the court gamblers part of these future earnings.
Biblical scholarship
Du Châtelet wrote a critical analysis of the Bible, specifically the book of Genesis and those of the New Testament.Discourse on happiness
Du Châtelet also wrote a monograph, Discours sur le bonheur, on the nature of happiness, both in general and specialized to women.Translation of the Fable of the Bees, and other works
Du Châtelet translated The Fable of the BeesThe Fable of the Bees
The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits is a book by Bernard Mandeville, consisting of the poem The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turn’d Honest and prose discussion of it. The poem was published in 1705 and the book first appeared in 1714...
in a free adaptation. She also wrote works on optics, rational linguistics, and the nature of free will.
Support of women's education
In her first independent work, the preface to her translation of the Fable of the Bees, du Châtelet argues strongly for women's education, particularly a strong secondary education as was available for young men in the French collèges. By denying women a good education, she argues, society prevents women from becoming eminent in the arts and sciences.Legacy
Although the classical mechanics of du Châtelet are not approached with the same methodology as Einstein's concept of mass and velocity, in his famous equation for the energy equivalent of matter E = mc² (where c represents the velocity of light), modern biographers and historians persist in seeing a neat accord with the principle E ∝ mv² first recognised by du Châtelet from over 150 years before. It should be emphasized, however, that from a physical point of view, du Châtelet's principle is a correct assessment of the kinetic energyKinetic energy
The kinetic energy of an object is the energy which it possesses due to its motion.It is defined as the work needed to accelerate a body of a given mass from rest to its stated velocity. Having gained this energy during its acceleration, the body maintains this kinetic energy unless its speed changes...
in classical mechanics
Classical mechanics
In physics, classical mechanics is one of the two major sub-fields of mechanics, which is concerned with the set of physical laws describing the motion of bodies under the action of a system of forces...
, and is the first term in an expansion of Einstein's Mass–energy equivalence.
A main-belt minor planet
12059 du Châtelet
12059 du Châtelet is a main-belt minor planet. It was discovered by Eric Walter Elst at the La Silla Observatory in Chile on March 1, 1998. It is named after Émilie du Châtelet, an 18th-century French mathematician, physicist, and author.-External links:*...
and a crater on Venus have been named in her honor, and she is the subject of two plays: Legacy of Light by Karen Zacarías and Emilie: La Marquise Du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight by Lauren Gunderson
Lauren Gunderson
Lauren Gunderson is an award-winning American playwright. She currently lives in San Francisco.Gunderson earned earned her Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Emory University in 2004, and her Master of Fine Arts in Dramatic Writing from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in...
. The opera Émilie
Émilie (opera)
Émilie is an opera by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, to a libretto by Amin Maalouf, written in 2008. It premiered at the Opéra de Lyon on 1 March 2010 with Finnish soprano, Karita Mattila, in the title role, to whom the work is dedicated. The opera is based on the life and writings of Marquise...
of Kaija Saariaho
Kaija Saariaho
Kaija Saariaho is a Finnish composer.Kaija Saariaho studied composition in Helsinki, Freiburg and Paris, where she has lived since 1982. Her studies and research at IRCAM have had a major influence on her music and her characteristically luxuriant and mysterious textures are often created by...
is about the last moments of her life.
Du Châtelet is often represented in portraits with mathematical iconography, such as holding a pair of dividers or a page of geometrical calculations. In the early nineteenth century, a French pamphlet of celebrated women (Femmes célèbres) introduced a possibly apocryphal story of du Châtelet's childhood. According to this story, a servant fashioned a doll for her by dressing up wooden dividers as a doll; however, du Châtelet undressed the dividers and intuited their purpose, making a circle with them.
Works
Scientific- Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu (1st edition, 1739; 2nd edition, 1744)
- Institutions de physique (1st edition, 1740; 2nd edition, 1742)
- Principes mathématiques de la philosophie naturelle par feue Madame la Marquise du Châtelet (1st edition, 1756; 2nd edition, 1759)
Other
- Examen de la Genèse
- Examen des Livres du Nouveau Testament
- Discours sur le bonheur
External links
- "Emilie du Chatelet", Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott CollegeAgnes Scott CollegeAgnes Scott College is a private undergraduate college in the United States. Agnes Scott's campus lies in downtown Decatur, Georgia, nestled inside the perimeter of the bustling metro-Atlanta area....
- The Portraits of Emilie du Chatelet at MathPages
- Voltaire and Emilie from the website of the Château de Cirey, accessed 11 December 2006.
- Correspondence between Frederick the Great and the Marquise du Châtelet Digital edition of Trier University Library (French and German text)
News media
- "The scientist that history forgot," The GuardianThe GuardianThe Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
15 May 2006.
- Object Lesson / Objet de Lux Article on Emilie du Châtelet from Cabinet (magazine)
- PhysicsWeb article: Emilie du Châtelet: the genius without a beard
- National Public Radio Morning Edition, November 27, 2006: Passionate Minds
- Women Scientists Today Link to CBC radio interview with author David Bodanis.
- http://www.arte.tv/de/Die-Welt-verstehen/einstein/841586.html Link to ARTE-Doku-Drama E = mc² – Einsteins große Idee. ARTE TV 26 April 2008, 12 March 2011.