# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/sophie-germain
# Generated: 2026-08-31T15:49:38.609Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/sophie-germain"
name: "Sophie Germain"
slug: "sophie-germain"
description: "She taught herself mathematics from her father's library and corresponded with the giants of the field under a male pseudonym because 18th-century Paris wouldn't let a woman through the door. Her work on elastic surfaces won the Paris Academy's grand prize; her theorem on Fermat's Last Theorem shaped the search for centuries."
tagline: "French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher (1776-1831)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Germain_-_%C5%92uvres_philosophiques%2C_1896_(Illustration_page_4).jpg"
gender: "female"
country:
  name: "France"
  isoCode: "FR"
category:
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  slug: "academics"
profileType:
  name: "Academic"
  slug: "academic"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1776-04-01"
deathDate: "1831-06-27"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
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  momentum:             0
  historical:           24.370384
  currentAttention:     0
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "STABLE"
ranks:
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  country:  null
  category: null
tags:
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  - name: "Europe"
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  - name: "19th Century"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Marie-Sophie Germain was born in Paris on 1 April 1776, into a world that had no place for women in mathematics. Her parents opposed her studies, but she read Euler in her father's library and began writing to Lagrange, Legendre, and Gauss as "Monsieur Le Blanc" — the ruse held until her insights made it irrelevant. She became a pioneer of elasticity theory and won the Paris Academy of Sciences' grand prize for her essay on the subject. Her contributions to Fermat's Last Theorem laid groundwork mathematicians built on for hundreds of years. Gauss recommended an honorary degree before her death from breast cancer on 27 June 1831, but it never came. A century later, Paris named a street and a girls' school in her memory, and the Academy established the Sophie Germain Prize.