Math

* http://www.astroseti.org/articulo/4286/
* http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/230626/Sophie-Germain

Her Career: What sort of mathematical work did she work on, and what wasthe impact of her work in mathematics and how her work was regarded by her contemporaries?

She worked in number theory, acoustics and elasticity. She won several prizes for her work on physicsand particularly on problems of acoustics and elasticity (Math Equals, 67). Her work in mathematics astonished Lagrange, who after finding out the real identity of “M. LeBlanc” (Sophie’s pen name) heserved as a source of support and encouragement to her. She also had the opportunity to work with the German mathematician Gauss. She wrote a series of letters to him about results she had obtained innumber theory. She submitted her prize-winner paper in 1816, which stated a law for vibrating elastic surfaces and was described by a fourth order partial differential equation. She also worked on anequation and had no solution: xn + yn = zn if n is an integer greater than 2 and x, y, and z are nonzero integers. She proved the special case in which x, y, z, and n are all relatively prime (have nocommon divisor except for 1) and n is a prime smaller than 100, although she did not publish her work (Britannica). Therefore, her contributions to mathematics were recognized by severalmathematicians of the era and she obtained the support of Gauss and Lagrange after they discovered her real identity.

* Her education: What kind of access did she have to education and what kind ofobstacles did she face? Does she have any similarities to the previous three women we discussed?
Just like Maria Agnesi, Sophie was also a daughter of a wealthy, upper-class family. Her father was amerchant and owned a library in which Sophie spent lots of her days during the French Revolution educating herself. Even though her family was a French upper class one, they did not support women...