Émilie du Châtelet

Émilie du Châtelet was a French mathematician and physicist. At Cirey, the du Châtelet château where Voltaire settled in 1734, the two worked closely together and shared an interest in Isaac Newton. Her Institutions de Physique (1740) discussed the ideas of both Newton and Leibniz, and in the vis viva debate she repeated and publicised an experiment showing that kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity. Her French translation of Newton's Principia, with her commentary, completed in 1749 and published after her death, remains the standard French version.