Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Infinite Is The Chasm In Which Our Thoughts Are Lost: Reflections On Sophie Germain's Essays, Adam Glesser, Bogdan D. Suceavă, Mihaela Vajiac

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

"Sophie Germain (1776–1831) is quite well-known to the mathematical community for her contributions to number theory [17] and elasticity theory (e.g., see [2, 5]). On the other hand, there have been few attempts to understand Sophie Germain as an intellectual of her time, as an independent thinker outside of academia, and as a female mathematician in France, facing the prejudice of the time of the First Empire and of the Bourbon Restoration, while pursuing her thoughts and interests and writing on them. Sophie Germain had to face a double challenge: the mathematical difficulty of the problems she approached and the …