Sophie Germain

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Sophie Germain

Sophie Germain (born April 1, 1776 in Paris ; † June 27, 1831 there ; occasionally, the anniversary of her death is also dated June 26, 1831) was a French mathematician .

Life

Research on théorie des surfaces élastiques , 1821

youth

Germain was born in Paris on April 1, 1776. She grew up the middle of three sisters. Her father Ambroise-François Germain (1726–1821) was a wealthy textile merchant who came from a family of goldsmiths and who became a member of the Constituent Assembly. The mother Marie-Madeleine Germain, née Gruguelu (? –1823) promoted the education of her daughters. The parental home was strongly influenced by the French Revolution and its thinkers.

Even in her youth, Germain read math books from her father's library against her parents' wishes. Attempts by the parents to dissuade the young woman from her preoccupation with mathematics, for example by neither lighting nor heating her room, remained fruitless. At the age of 13 she learned the Latin and Greek languages ​​in self-study. This later enabled her to study the works of Newton , Euler , Laplace , Lagrange, and Gauss .

But first she needed a mathematical education. This was not easy because at that time women were not allowed to attend universities. That is why she obtained lecture materials from the École polytechnique from the student Antoine Auguste Le Blanc, who died in the French Revolution and could no longer help, and continued her education through self-study. After his death, she used his name to post her solutions to exercises and have them corrected. Pleased by the quality of the solutions sent in, her Professor Joseph-Louis Lagrange Le Blanc asked for an interview, to which Sophie Germain finally appeared and explained herself. Lagrange was pleasantly surprised to discover that the talented student was turning out to be a woman, and then openly encouraged her. That made her known in Paris.

Mathematical discoveries

Carl Friedrich Gauss

After studying the work of the mathematicians mentioned above, Germain worked on her own research and presented it to Carl Friedrich Gauß from 1804 in an exchange of letters . However, she used the pseudonym Auguste Antoine Le Blanc again because she feared that she would not be taken seriously as a woman. It was not until 1807 that Gauss found out about her true identity, as Sophie Germain turned to the French commandant General Penetry (a friend of her family) on the occasion of the French occupation of Braunschweig in 1806 to intercede for Gauss's security.

Germain's grave in the Pere Lachaise cemetery

In particular, Germain worked on the so-called Fermat theorem , which was only proven in full generality at the end of the 20th century, so it was an unproven conjecture at the time. Germain proved that a special case of this conjecture applies to a series of primes that were later called Sophie-Germain primes .

From 1809 Sophie Germain dealt with mathematical physics, which was inspired by the experiments (sound figures) of Chladni, on the occasion of a competition of the French Academy about the vibrations of elastic plates . The problem was described by Lagrange as too difficult for the mathematical methods of the time, he himself and other well-known mathematicians such as Poisson worked on it. The solution that Sophie Germain submitted in 1811 was also flawed. Lagrange, inspired by their work, proposed an improved equation, which, however, neither he nor Germain could derive with the necessary mathematical rigor. In 1815, Sophie Germain was awarded a prize in the academy's reopened competition, but she was disappointed with the non-recognition of her work by some mathematicians, especially Siméon Denis Poisson , and did not appear at the award ceremony. Since Poisson used some of her findings in her own publications, Germain decided in 1821 to publish the paper on elastic surfaces for which she had been awarded the prize.

In 1831 Gauss campaigned for the University of Göttingen to award her an honorary doctorate . But that never happened, as Germain died of breast cancer a few months earlier at the age of 55 .

Fonts

  • Research on the theory of surfaces élastiques . 1821.
  • Remarks on the nature, limits and scope of the question of elastic surfaces . 1826.
  • Mémoire sur la courbure des surfaves . 1830.
  • Considérations générales sur l'état des sciences et des lettres aux différentes époques de leur culture . 1831 ( posthumous , unfinished)

See also

literature

  • Dora Musielak: Prime Mystery: The Life and Mathematics of Sophie Germain: Revolutionary Mathematician , Springer 2020.
  • Amy Dahan-Dalmédico : Sophie Germain, Scientific American, December 1991.
  • Louise S. Grinstein and Paul J. Campbell (Eds.): Women of Mathematics, A Biobibliographic Sourcebook . Greenwood Press, New York 1987, ISBN 0-313-24849-4 .
  • Lynn M. Osen: Women in Mathematics . MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 1990, ISBN 0-262-15014-X .
  • Edna E. Kramer: The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics . Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ) 1983, ISBN 0-691-08305-3 , pp. 476-477.
  • Edna E. Kramer: Germain, Sophie . In: Charles Coulston Gillispie (Ed.): Dictionary of Scientific Biography . tape 5 : Emil Fischer - Gottlieb Haberlandt . Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1972, p. 375-376 .
  • Louis L. Bucciarelli, Nancy Dworski Sophie Germain: an essay in the history of the theory of elasticity . Reidel, Dordrecht, Boston 1980.
  • Georg Biedenkapp: Sophie Germain, a female thinker . HW Schmidt, Jena 1910.
  • Simon Singh: Fermat's last sentence . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (March 1, 2000), ISBN 978-3-423-33052-7 .
  • Andrea Del Centina: Unpublished manuscripts of Sophie Germain and a revaluation of her work on Fermat's Last Theorem , Archive for the History of Exact Sciences, Volume 62, 2008, pp. 349-392.
  • Andrea Del Centina, Alessandra Fiocca: The correspondence between Sophie Germain and Carl Friedrich Gauss , Archive History Exact Sciences, Volume 66, 2012, pp. 585-700.
  • Philippe Etchecopar: Sophie Germain, mathématicienne (1776–1831) , in: Florence Piron (dir.): Femmes savantes, femmes de science , Éditions de l'Association science et bien commun, Laval 2014.
  • Anne Boyé: Sophie Germain, une mathématicienne face aux préjugés de son temps , in: Bulletin de l'APMEP , nº 523, mars-avril 2017, pp. 231-243.

Web links

Commons : Sophie Germain  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Sophie Germain  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Yannick Ripa: Femmes d'exception - les raisons de l'oubli . Éditions Le Chevalier Bleu, Paris 2018, ISBN 979-1-03180273-2 , pp. 169 f .
  2. ^ Peter Frize: The Bold and the Brave: Sophie Germain, Mileva Marić Einstein and Rosalind Franklin. In: Monique Frize (Ed.): The Bold and the Brave. A History of Women in Science and Engineering. University of Ottawa Press, Ottawa 2009, pp. 264-273, here: 265.
  3. ^ A b Peter Frize: The Bold and the Brave: Sophie Germain, Mileva Marić Einstein and Rosalind Franklin. In: Monique Frize (Ed.): The Bold and the Brave. A History of Women in Science and Engineering. University of Ottawa Press, Ottawa 2009, pp. 264-273, here: 267.
  4. ^ Dunnington Gauss, American Mathematical Society, p. 68.
  5. ^ Peter Frize: The Bold and the Brave: Sophie Germain, Mileva Marić Einstein and Rosalind Franklin. In: Monique Frize (Ed.): The Bold and the Brave. A History of Women in Science and Engineering. University of Ottawa Press, Ottawa 2009, pp. 264–273, here: 268.
personal data
SURNAME Germain, Sophie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH April 1, 1776
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH June 27, 1831
Place of death Paris