For Women’s History Month; a rather sad story. Before the women’s movement, Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet was remembered as Voltaire’s mistress (if remembered at all). Her biographer, Judith Zinsser, tries to make the case that the Marquise was a first-rate mathematician and scientist in her own right. The catch is that although this book is quite a readable history of an interesting woman and her times Zinsser doesn’t seem to be comfortable enough with mathematics and science for her argument to be convincing on its own.


The irony is circumstantial evidence indicates Zinsser is probably correct. The Marquise translated Newton (I’m not sure if Zinsser’s claim that her translation is still the definitive French version is correct). She mastered calculus, which is no mean feat – I’d bet there weren’t a dozen people in the world who could make that claim in the 1730s. Although Zinsser glosses over it, the Marquise’s most significant work might be experiments with heat – she set up a foundry at her chateau and measured the cooling rate of various molten metals. It seems that Voltaire, although he assisted her, didn’t quite understand what she was trying to accomplish here – although it isn’t very glamorous, the careful measurement of physical properties is the foundation of all science and technology. Her contemporaries acknowledged her with favorable reviews of her books without mentioning her gender or nobility. It’s too bad this book – which I again agree is interesting enough as a biography of a courtier of the time – doesn’t go into more detail on just what was involved in the Marquise’s mathematical and scientific work. ( )