Odd People
Émilie du Châtelet
She dressed as a man to get into the café
The arguments happened in rooms women could not enter. So she put on men's clothes and went in.
In eighteenth-century Paris, new mathematics and physics circulated in the academies and the cafés. The Academy admitted no women, and places like the Café Gradot were in practice men's rooms.
The story goes that she arrived in men's clothes. The proprietor recognised her and gave her a table anyway. A suit of clothes carried her over the threshold.
Her most durable work is the French Principia. But it was not a translation.
In the commentary she did not merely render Newton. She set out, with experimental support, the Leibnizian position that the energy of motion goes as the square of the speed — against the prevailing French view.
She died at forty-two, days after childbirth. The manuscript was finished, and appeared ten years later.
The question that remainsIf knowledge moved through rooms some people could not enter — how many questions were lost outside the door?