Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet (17 December 1706-10 September 1749) was a French natural philosopher and mathematician during the early 1730s until her untimely death due to childbirth complications in 1749.
Her most recognized achievement is her translation of and commentary on Isaac Newton's 1687 book Principia containing basic laws of physics. The translation, published posthumously in 1756, is still considered the standard French translation today.
Her commentary includes a profound contribution to Newtonian mechanics -the postulate of an additional conservation law for total energy, of which kinetic energy of motion is one element. This led to her conceptualization of energy as such, and to derive its quantitative relationships to the mass and velocity of an object.
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Her philosophical magnum opus, Institutions de Physique (Paris, 1740, first edition), or Foundations of Physics, circulated widely, generated heated debates, and was republished and translated into several other languages within two years of its original publication. She participated in the famous vis viva debate, concerning the best way to measure the force of a body and the best means of thinking about conservation principles.
Posthumously, her ideas were heavily represented in the most famous text of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, first published shortly after du Châtelet's death.
Numerous biographies, books and plays have been written about her life and work in the two centuries since her death. In the early 21st century, her life and ideas have generated renewed interest.
Émilie du Châtelet was born on 17 December 1706 in Paris, the only girl amongst six children. Du Châtelet's education has been the subject of much speculation, but nothing is known with certainty.
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Among their acquaintances was Fontenelle, the perpetual secretary of the French Académie des Sciences. Du Châtelet'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.
Du Châtelet'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.
As a result, by the age of twelve she was fluent in Latin, Italian, Greek and German; she was later to publish translations into French of Greek and Latin plays and philosophy. She received education in mathematics, literature, and science.
Du Châtelet also liked to dance, was a passable performer on the harpsichord, 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.
Du Châtelet may have met Voltaire in her childhood at one of her father's salons; Voltaire himself dates their meeting to 1729, when he returned from his exile in London. However, their friendship developed from May 1733 when she re-entered society after the birth of her third child.
Sharing a passion for science, Voltaire and Du Châtelet collaborated scientifically. They set up a laboratory in Du Châtelet's home. In a healthy competition, they both entered the 1738 Paris Academy prize contest on the nature of fire, since Du Châtelet disagreed with Voltaire's essay. Although neither of them won, both essays received honourable mention and were published. She thus became the first woman to have a scientific paper published by the Academy.
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In May 1748, Du Châtelet began an affair with the poet Jean François de Saint-Lambert and became pregnant. In a letter to a friend she confided her fears that she would not survive her pregnancy. On the night of 4 September 1749 she gave birth to a daughter, Stanislas-Adélaïde. Du Châtelet died on 10 September 1749, at Lunéville, from a pulmonary embolism. She was 42. Her daughter died 20 months later.
In 1749, the year of Du Châtelet's death, she completed the work regarded as her outstanding achievement: her translation into French, with her commentary, of Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, often referred to as simply the Principia, including her derivation of the notion of conservation of energy from its principles of mechanics.
Published ten years after her death, today Du Châtelet's translation of the Principia is still the standard translation of the work into French. Her translation and commentary of the Principia contributed to the completion of the scientific revolution in France and to its acceptance in Europe.
Du Châtelet made a crucial scientific contribution in making Newton's historic work more accessible in a timely, accurate and insightful French translation, augmented by her own original concept of energy conservation.
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be virtuous, healthy, and have a capacity
for enjoyment and for passion.
Emilie du Chatelet
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