• DOI:10.1090/S0273-0979-2012-01370-8
• Corpus ID: 45323465

About the cover: Sophie Germain and a problem in number theory

@article{Alexanderson2012AboutTC,
  title={About the cover: Sophie Germain and a problem in number theory},
  author={Gerald L. Alexanderson},
  journal={Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society},
  year={2012},
  volume={49},
  pages={327-331}
}

• G. Alexanderson
• Published 1 May 2012
• Education
• Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society

Marie-Sophie Germain (1776–1831), a largely self-educated French mathematician, for many years has been known for her early work in number theory and also for her work in physics, where she studied vibrating plates and Chladni figures as well as related questions in the theory of elasticity. Though much of her work in number theory was on Fermat’s Last Theorem, she, of course, failed to prove it. But recently examined manuscripts and letters have revealed that between 1816 and 1819 she went much more deeply into that problem than had previously been known. In 2010, R. Laubenbacher and D. Pengelley described this discovery in an important paper in Historia Mathematica [5]. The authors claim that there is now evidence, if any more were needed, that Germain was the most productive contributor to mathematics among women up to her time, where others might have been Hypatia, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, or Émilie du Châtelet. As important as her mathematical work is, however, the more inspiring story about Germain is that she carried out this work after a childhood in Paris in the late eighteenth century where, as a young woman, she was strongly discouraged from studying mathematics and was not allowed to attend the École Polytechnique. With enormous determination, she persisted in studying mathematics when she was in her teens by reading mathematics books in her father’s library. We are told in G. Libri’s early biography of Germain [6] that even her parents tried to discourage her from studying mathematics; they did not think that it was a suitable area of study for a young lady in late eighteenth century French society. Libri provides stories of the young Germain working on mathematics well into the night even after there was no heat from the fireplaces and her room was so cold that the ink froze in the inkwells. The story of Germain’s persistence in studying mathematics is told by D. Musielak in a recent work, Sophie’s Diary/A Mathematical Novel [7]. The story is a fascinating one. Germain, a member of a bourgeois family of silk merchants,