Sophie Germain Research Paper

Sophie Germain is one of France’s greatest female mathematician prior to revolutionary war, she was the daughter of Ambroise-François Germain and Marie-Madeleine Gruguelu. Her father worked as a part time deputy to the State-General. In his speeches he gave he referred to himself as a merchant and ardently defended the rights of the Third Estate, which he was there to represent. Somewhat later in his life time he became one of the directors of the Banque de France or in English the Bank of France. His library with wide ranging information enabled his daughter to than educate herself while at home. In time, both of Sophie's sisters would marry successful men, but her own future, which she never had neither marriage nor children throughout her life was influenced by events that took place when she only was at the young age of thirteen. Sophie read an ancient story of the death of Archimedes at the hands of a Roman soldier. The grand scientist of antiquity became her aspiring hero, and she conceived the idea that she too must become a mathematician after reading this story. After teaching herself different languages such as Latin and Greek, she than went to read Newton's and Euler's work, despite her parents, who had a large opposition to a career in the mathematics field, …show more content…
At that time she was able to obtain the lecture notes from classes at the recently established École Polytechnique, she was particularly interested in Lagrange’s lectures on analysis. Scholars at the school were expected to organize end of term reports. She actually ended up pretending to be a student there and using the false name "Le Balanc", Sophie Germain wrote a paper on analysis and sent it to Lagrange. He was astounded at its originally, praised it publicly, sought out its author, and thus discovered that M. Le Blanc was actually in fact Sophie Germain. From then on, he became her support and a personal mathematical