Emilie du Châtelet

Lucille Raynal (University College Dublin)

Ed. by Síofra Pierse, University College Dublin
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.5.2.04: French Writing and Culture: Eighteenth-Century and the Enlightenment, 1700-1800.
Vol. editors: Edward Forman (University of Bristol), Jenny Mander (University of Cambridge), Síofra Pierse (University College Dublin), Tim Unwin (University of Bristol), David Williams (University of Sheffield)

Dates

Born 17 Dec 1706
Died 10 Sep 1749
Activity 1737-1745

Places

Active in France

Activities

Primary

Mathematician
Physicist

Resources

Du Châtelet, born Gabrielle-Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil and known as Marquise Du Châtelet-Lomont after her marriage, was a French woman of letters, mathematician, and physicist. For a long time, she was better known as Voltaire’s lover than as the brilliant translator of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). A multiplication of recent works on Du Châtelet, and particularly the recent two-volume edition of her remaining letters in La Correspondence d’Émilie Du Châtelet, edited by Ulla Kölving and Andrew Brown, have greatly contributed to the rediscovery of this major figure of the 18^th<…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1610 words

Citation: Raynal, Lucille. "Emilie du Châtelet". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 January 2023 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12717, accessed 25 April 2024.]

View recommended reading for this article

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here