Émilie du Châtelet

Émilie de Breteuil was born into an aristocratic family in Paris; her father, a court official of Louis XIV, gave her an unusually rigorous education for a girl.

Tutored at her family's Paris home, she learned Latin, Italian, Greek, and German and showed early talent in mathematics and fencing.

At eighteen she married the marquis du Chastellet, a military officer, with whom she had three children.

Du Châtelet began a long romantic and intellectual relationship with Voltaire, who called her 'a great man whose only fault was being a woman'.

Du Châtelet and Voltaire settled at her husband's chateau at Cirey-sur-Blaise, building a laboratory and library where they studied physics and wrote together.

Her Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu, entered independently of Voltaire, was published by the Paris Academy of Sciences.

Her Foundations of Physics sought to reconcile Newtonian, Leibnizian, and Cartesian ideas, and defended the concept of kinetic energy (vis viva) against Newtonian critics.

In her final years du Châtelet translated Newton's Principia Mathematica into French with an extensive commentary, finishing the work shortly before her death; it remains the standard French translation.

Du Châtelet died at the court of Stanislas in Luneville of a pulmonary embolism, six days after the birth of her daughter.