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Sophie Germain's Life And Accomplishments

834 Words4 Pages

Jordyn Crispi
Alyssa Correa
Vanessa Boone
Sophie Germain Sophie Germain, originally named Marie-Sophie Germain, was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher born April 1st, 1776, and died June 27th, 1831. Her introduction to math came from discussions she overheard between her father and his friends on the topics of math and science. At a young age, Germain was motivated to pursue math and physics, and she eventually went against the the wishes of her family to become an award-winning mathematician. Her hard work and dedication did not come easy, as she was confined to her home during the French Revolution. During her confinement, Germain spent multiple hours in her father’s library, where she came across L'Histoire des Mathématiques, which sparked her interest in mathematics. Germain’s interest in math drove her to teach herself Latin and Greek so she could understand Sir Isaac Newton and Leonhard Euler’s works. A fellow mathematician, Jacques Antoine-Joseph Cousin, encouraged her studies, while her parents disapproved of her interest. In Germain’s society, it was looked difficult for women to enter into the fields of math and science. Because of this, Germain’s parents went to extreme measures to keep her home and away …show more content…

During this tie, Germain also returned to her passion for number theory. In 1819, she resumed her correspondence with Gauss, in which she described her solution to Fermat’s last theorem. Her solution stated that there is no solution for the equation xn + yn = zn if n is an integer greater than 2 and x, y, and z are nonzero integers. She proved the special case in which x, y, z, and n are all relatively prime and n is a prime smaller than 100 (Barrow-Green). This solution was first published in 1825, in a second edition of Legendre’s “Théorie des

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