When Sophie Germain鈥檚 father found out she was obsessed with mathematics, he confiscated her candles and put out the fire in her bedroom. But after she was discovered one morning fast asleep at her desk, wrapped in blankets and the ink frozen in its pot, he relented.
Banned from entering Paris鈥檚 Revolutionary Ecole Polytechnique, Germain assumed the identity of a male student who had left, taking over his lecture notes and submitting work under his name. She was rumbled only when a professor demanded to meet this young scholar whose work had suddenly improved so dramatically. Luckily for her (and for mathematics), he was sufficiently enlightened to encourage her further.
Forced to work at home from books, she became fascinated by number theory. Pretending to be a man, she plucked up the courage to solicit advice from Europe鈥檚 leading expert, Carl Gauss (famous for the normal distribution). After three years of correspondence, he was astounded to learn her true gender, and boasted about his young prot茅g茅e to his friends. A few years later, after extensive research into elasticity and vibrating plates, she became the first woman to win a prize from France鈥檚 Royal Academy.聽Patricia Fara
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