Mathematician, Philosopher, Gambler

Emilie du Châtelet

Maths is the subject that still, after all these years, makes me shudder. You say maths and I run screaming out of the room. I mean, the ability of this subject to stress the ever-loving hell out of me really cannot be exaggerated. But, there was a woman out there for whom Maths was a gift and to whom she was a blessing. Emilie du Châtelet was a gift to mathematics and natural philosophy in the 18th century. 

As her name would suggest, Emilie was French. A privileged upper-class French woman, her eventual entry into the intellectual arena raises questions. After all, while trained in traditional feminine arts, women were not educated in subjects like maths and science at the time, and Emilie was no exception until she was.

According to scholars, her induction into the world of academia probably took place in stages. There is a lack of clarity when it comes to this subject. The first stage was when her younger brother was preparing to enter the Church. Scholars speculate that between the ages of 9 and 13, Emilie probably sat in on his tutoring sessions learning Greek, Latin, Italian, and mathematics. The second stage comprises the first few years of her marriage, wherein Emilie, after bearing three children, returned to Paris and entered the tutelage of Moreau de Maupertuis, a member of the Academy of Sciences. 

Now, before we proceed I want to get one thing out of the way, Emilie du Châtelet’s marriage and how it played into her future relationships. First and foremost, Emilie had an arranged marriage with Marquis Florent-Claude du Chastellet-Lomont (what a mouthful), and they stayed together in Burgundy for the first five years of their marriage. After having fulfilled her wifely duties, that is, bearing him children, Emilie and her husband agreed to live separate lives while maintaining their familial unit. By all accounts, they had an amicable relationship where both parties were committed to protecting the family’s interests. With all that sorted, Emilie went on to have affairs with other men, one of whom will become particularly relevant in the next paragraph. 

Voltaire, the French writer, philosopher, and public activist, was a huge part of Emilie’s life both personally, as her lover, and intellectually, as her academic partner. The two lived together for over ten years in Emilie’s country house in northeastern France, where she generally kept him out of trouble with the authorities while the two engaged in academic pursuits. 

Man, this article is all over the place but to understand Emilie’s contributions, we need to segue briefly to an important debate dominating the newly emerging field of “science” in the 18th century. Namely the conflict between Cartesianism (Descartes) and Newtonianism (Isaac Newton). According to Descartes, the Earth's shape resembled a lemon, squashed at the equator and pointed at the poles. In contrast, according to Newton’s calculations, the Earth was supposedly shaped like a geoid. We all know whose conclusions were eventually proven right, but at the time, it was a huge point of contention in the scientific arena. 

Voltaire was a Newtonian through and through, but while enamoured with the ideas of the English mathematician, mathematician Voltaire was not. Guess who was a certifiable maths genius though? Emilie du Châtelet. She worked alongside Voltaire, helping him as he wrote the 1738 Elements of the Philosophy of Newton. Of course, this was not her last engagement with Newtonian mathematics, as Châtelet went on to produce the first French translation of Newton’s Principia in 1748. 

Far from being a simple word-for-word translation, Châtelet provided explanations for Newton’s concepts, her commentary, and additional references to modern work produced by French and Swiss mathematicians and physicists in that period. Heck, Emilie’s translations included a section where she translated Newton’s ratios into calculus for ease of understanding, highlighting how well she understood the concepts themselves. 

Of course, Emilie continued to grow intellectually. In fact, she moved in a different intellectual direction than her friend and partner Voltaire, influenced by the German thinker Leibniz, a difference that the two acknowledged and appreciated till Emilie’s death in 1749.  

But, that is still a ways away. During her lifetime Emilie dipped her toes in many philosophical pies. On one hand, she wrote Institutions de Physique or Lessons in Physics (1740), in which she artfully discussed, synthesized, and criticized ideas propounded by Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz. On the other, she engaged in theology through her critical analysis of the Bible. Of course, that is just the tip of the iceberg. This remarkable woman elucidated upon the concept of kinetic energy ( yes, the kinetic energy you learn about in 9th grade), which was gaining ground in the 18th century, through her experimental inquiries. What’s more to say?!

Here was a woman who enjoyed the “frivolous” things in life just as much as she enjoyed her intellectual pursuits. She was, as Voltaire described, “a great man whose only fault was being a woman.” And while a lot of the conversation around Emilie du Châtelet tends to focus on her love interests, I think that is a great disservice to one of the brightest minds in history.

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PS: Emilie du Châtelet was a wild gambler. I don’t know what I find more terrifying, her fearlessness when it came to losing money or her ability to use mathematics to her advantage at the table.