Sophie Germain

Germain taught herself mathematics from her father's library during the Terror, when it was not safe for a girl of thirteen to go out, and her parents took away her candles and her fire to stop her; she worked wrapped in blankets until they gave in. The École Polytechnique did not admit women, so she obtained the lecture notes and submitted work under the name of a former student, Antoine-August Le Blanc. Lagrange asked to meet the author, discovered a young woman, and became her sponsor.

She corresponded with Gauss under the same false name for three years. When she revealed herself — having intervened to protect him during the French occupation of Hanover — he wrote that a woman who overcomes such obstacles to master the abscure parts of number theory must have the noblest courage. Her work on Fermat's Last Theorem gave the first general result on it, and her theory of vibrating elastic surfaces won the Academy's grand prize in 1816, after two rejected attempts, making her the first woman to attend its sessions in her own right. She died of breast cancer at fifty-five. Gauss had persuaded Göttingen to give her an honorary doctorate; it had not been conferred.