Émilie du Châtelet Trivia Questions

Voltaire did flee to England in 1726, but du Châtelet was only 19 and not yet involved with him. They met years later, after his return to France.

She gave birth to a daughter in September 1749 and died a week later from a pulmonary embolism, a common childbirth complication.

Du Châtelet was educated at home by tutors, not a convent. She was fluent in Latin, Greek, and German, and studied mathematics from her teens.

Their relationship was not secret; they lived together openly at her estate and collaborated publicly. They were widely known as a couple in intellectual circles.

She frequently gambled at the French royal court, sometimes winning large sums that she used for books and scientific equipment.

Her translation of Newton's 'Principia' included her own commentary, which refined and corrected some of his calculations. It remains the standard French translation today.

She never won that prize. The first woman to win was Sophie Germain in 1816, years after du Châtelet's death. Du Châtelet did submit an essay to the academy, though.

In her 'Institutions de Physique', she proposed that the energy of a moving body depends on v² (not v), a key insight later formalized into the kinetic energy formula.