Émilie du Châtelet

Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil was born in Paris on 17 December 1706 into minor nobility. Her breakthrough came in 1740 with Institutions de Physique, a philosophical work spanning the principles of knowledge, God, space, time, matter, and Newtonian gravity - revised in 1742, it was translated into German and Italian within a year and ignited heated debate across Europe. She threw herself into the vis viva controversy, the struggle to define force and conservation, and her arguments earned prominent placement in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie after her death. She spent years translating and annotating Newton's Principia; published posthumously in 1756, it remains the standard French edition. She was Voltaire's intellectual partner and lover, a relationship that eclipsed her in popular memory for two centuries. She died on 10 September 1749, but the early twenty-first century has pulled her back into focus.