Émilie du Châtelet

Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet (17 December 1706 to 10 September 1749), was a French mathematician, physicist and philosopher of the Enlightenment. Born in Paris to a family of the lesser nobility, she was tutored widely and from 1733 studied mathematics under Maupertuis and then Clairaut. Her philosophical masterwork, the Institutions de physique of 1740, set Newtonian physics beside the metaphysics of Leibniz and Wolff, and she defended the principle of sufficient reason and a place for innate principles against Locke. She took part in the vis viva debate, arguing that the force of a moving body depends on the square of its velocity, and she wrote the French translation and commentary on Newton's Principia, still the standard one. For sixteen years she worked beside Voltaire at Cirey, and her Dissertation on the nature and propagation of fire was the first work by a woman published by the Paris Academy of Sciences.