Sophie Germain’s mathematical career advanced solely through self-education and correspondence.

Evidence

Germain was brilliant, entirely self-educated and self-employed. At first, she wrote under a pseudonym, concealing her gender from colleagues. Her parents strongly objected to her interests and deliberately kept her room cold at night so that she could not sit up studying mathematics. Nor was there much relief when she was old enough to enter higher education: women (even after the French Revolution) were not allowed to enter the new Ecole Polytechnique. Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), one of the most eminent mathematicians of all time, was Germain’s friend and supporter, by correspondence, both before and after she revealed her gender to her profession. — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 1392

Categorization

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