This is a portrait of Emilie du Chatelet (d. 1749), a brilliant mathematician and physicist from the French Enlightenment. Multi-talented (by age twelve she knew six languages, she studied fencing and astronomy), Emilie supported her scientific interests like buying textbooks and lab equipment by using her math abilities to succeed at gambling. One of her most successful experiments involved dropping lead balls into wet clay and noticing that “the balls that hit the clay with twice the velocity reached a depth nine times greater.” This experiment corrected Isaac Newton’s suggestion about the proportion of energy to mass (energy is proportional to mv2 and not mv). She accomplished much more before her early death at age 42.
Source(s): This Month in Physics History – https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200812/physicshistory.cfm .
