A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Germain, Sophia
GERMAIN, SOPHIA,
Born at Paris in 1776, made, at a comparatively early age, an extraordinary progress in the mathematical sciences, and, in 1816, obtained the prize of the Academy of Sciences for a memoir on the vibration of elastic laminae. She pursued this subject further in her "Recherches sur la théorie des surfaces élastiques," published in 1820; in another memoir presented to the Academy in 1826, and in an article in the "Anales de Physique et Chiraie," which appeared in 1828. During the revolution of the three days, she was quietly engaged at Paris in the preparation of a memoir on the curvature of surfaces, which was, when finished, inserted in "Crelle's Journal of the Mathematics." She died in 1831, of a cancer. Distinguished as she was by her acquirements and performances in the exact sciences, her attention had been far from being exclusively confined to them, but was, on the contrary, directed, in no inconsiderable degree, also to natural science, geography, history, and the speculations of philosophy.