Emilie du ChΓΆtelet
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 18th-century mathematical genius whose insights into Newton and Leibniz were part of the great advance in science in the Enlightenment.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the outstanding French mathematicians and natural philosophers of the 18th Century, celebrated across Europe. Emilie du Châtelet, 1706-49, created a translation of Newton’s Principia from Latin into French that helped spread the light of mathematics on the emerging science, and her own book Institutions de Physique, with its lessons on physics, was welcomed as profound. She had the privileges of wealth and aristocracy, yet had to fight to be taken seriously as an intellectual in a world of ideas that was almost exclusively male.
With
Patricia Fara
Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge
David Wootton
Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York
And
Judith Zinsser
Professor Emerita of History at Miami University of Ohio and biographer of Emilie du ChΓΆtelet.
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Last on
LINKS AND FURTHER READING
READING LIST:
Katherine Brading, Emilie Du Chatelet and the Foundations of Physical Science (Routledge, 2019)
Emilie Du Chatelet (ed. Judith P. Zinsser and trans. Isabelle Bour and Judith P. Zinsser), Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
Patricia Fara, Pandora’s Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment (Pimlico, 2004)
Patricia Fara, Scientists Anonymous: Great Stories of Women in Science (Icon Books Ltd, 2007)
Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Harvard University Press, 1991)
Geoffrey V. Sutton, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment (Perseus, 1997)
Mary Terrall, The Man who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2006)
David Wootton, Power, Pleasure and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison (Belknap Press, 2018)
Judith P. Zinsser, Emilie Du Chatelet: Daring Genius of the Enlightenment (Penguin, 2007)
RELATED LINKS:
Broadcasts
- Thu 4 Feb 2021 09:00Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4
- Thu 4 Feb 2021 21:30Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4
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