Frank Hamel

An eighteenth century marquise Frank Hamel

Émilie du Châtelet was a French natural philosopher and mathematician during the early 1730s until her untimely death due to childbirth complications in 1749. Her most recognized achievement is her translation of and commentary on Isaac Newton's Principia. Her commentary includes a profound contribution to Newtonian mechanics-the postulate of an additional conservation law for total energy, of which kinetic energy of motion is one element. This led to her conceptualization of energy as such, and to derive its quantitative relationships to the mass and velocity of an object. Her philosophical magnum opus, Institutions de Physique, circulated widely and was republished and translated into several other languages within two years of its original publication. Her ideas were heavily represented in the most famous text of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, published shortly after du Châtelet's death. Author Frank Hamel recounts her fascinating life in this detailed biography, first printed in 1911.