The Top Ten Little Known Facts about Sophie Germain that you Won't Find in any Textbook...

David Letterman would be proud... The following list is, like the biography I wrote, a result of three years of research and my uncanny ability to absorb totally useless informtion. Amaze your friends by memorizing these completely useless facts. Who knows? Someday, something you see here may just be a question on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." (Regis, beware...)

1. Sophie was the middle child of three daughters. One of her sisters went on to marry a government official, the other married a doctor. Sophie never married, and was described by some to be, in her youth, a "shy, awkward teenager."
2. Her father, Ambroise-Francoise Germain was a wealthy silk merchant and an "elected deputy of the third estate of the Constutuent Assembly of 1789." This was a group of liberal-viewed men who discussed very heated political topics of pre-revolutionary France.
3. Sophie seems to have gotten her fifteen minutes of fame... at least in her home city of Paris, France. The city boasts a street, a school for young girls, and a hotel all named in her honor.



4. On the sign for the Paris Hotel named in her honor, Sophie's date of death is incorrect. See the picture. Look closely... Leave it to me to be the one to notice an error like this. (Also, do realize that I did NOT base my illustrations for the site on this picture. Any resemblences are strictly coincidental.)
5. In reality, she died in 1831 of Breast Cancer. Breast Cancer is still a leading cause of death in women today. To learn more about Breast Cancer, CLICK HERE.
6. Sophie was not the only aspiring female mathematician to have her nightly reading routine disrupted by disapproving parents. Mary Somerville of Great Britain would find herself in the same situation some years later when her parents confiscated her secret stash of candles the same way Sophie's did.
7. When the Eiffel Tower was built in 1889, 72 French scholars were honored by having their names engraved on the lofty structure. Sophie's name failed to make it onto the tower, even though her concepts in the physics of elasticity played an important role in its construction.
8. Sophie helped discover one of the planets... years after her death! One of her textbooks contained a sentence describing the stability of orbits. A man named Adams read the book, believed her math, and went looking for the planet disturbing the orbit of the planet uranus. He discovered Neptune.
9. Social prejudice wasn't Sophie's only rival... she had another, a man by the name of Simeon-Denis Poisson. He used her work to try and devise his own theory of elasticity in 1813. Her third paper- the one that won her the Paris prize- was a fierce attack on one of Poisson's elasticity memoirs. (You go, girl!)
10. Since mathematician and scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss (one of Sophie's early mentors) is typically depicted as an older man, not many people realize that he is really about the same age as she. Her main rival, Poisson, was in actuality five years younger than she was.

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