In Our Time

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.

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In Our Time: Emilie du Châtelet

04/02/2021

Emilie du Châtelet

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Emilie du Châtelet

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss an astonishing mathematician of the French Enlightenment.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 18th-century mathematical genius whose insights into Newton and Leibniz were part of the great advance in science in the Enlightenment.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the outstanding French mathematicians and natural philosophers of the 18th Century, celebrated across Europe.  Emilie du Châtelet, 1706-49, created a translation of Newton’s Principia from Latin into French  that helped spread the light of mathematics on the emerging science, and her own book  Institutions de Physique, with its lessons on physics, was welcomed as profound.  She had the privileges of wealth and aristocracy, yet had to fight to be taken seriously as an intellectual in a world of ideas that was almost exclusively male.
 
With

Patricia Fara
Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge

David Wootton
Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York

And

Judith Zinsser
Professor Emerita of History at Miami University of Ohio and biographer of Emilie du Châtelet.

Producer: Simon Tillotson

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