The Woman Who Calculated Everything

Émilie du Châtelet translated Newton's Principia Mathematica into French. Her version, completed in 1749, is still the standard French translation today — nearly three centuries later. She also conducted original research on energy and motion, proposing that energy is proportional to mass times velocity squared, a formulation the rest of physics would take decades to catch up to.

She funded all of this by gambling.

Du Châtelet applied probability theory to card games the way other people applied it to astronomy. She calculated odds, exploited them, and used her winnings to buy books, laboratory equipment, and time. Voltaire, her partner of fifteen years, called her "a great man whose only fault was being a woman." She seems not to have regarded it as a fault at all.

In the spring of 1749, at forty-two, she discovered she was pregnant. She knew the odds. She had always known the odds. She calculated that the baby would arrive in September. She calculated that the translation could be finished by August.

So she worked. Through the heat of summer, at her desk, she raced the one deadline that could not be negotiated. The manuscript was complete when she went into labor.

She died six days later.

The translation outlived her by centuries. She had bet on the right thing.