- Lived:
- 1706–1749 · Paris, Cirey, and Lunéville, France
- Tradition:
- Enlightenment physics and philosophy; the great synthesizer of Newton and Leibniz
- The Big Idea:
- A moving body carries something proportional to the square of its speed — the ancestor of energy — and a constrained life can still be engineered for happiness, because the love of study is a resource no injustice can confiscate.
- In their words:
- "The love of study is, of all the passions, the one that contributes most to our happiness."
- If you remember one thing:
- History filed her as "Voltaire's mistress." She was a physicist-philosopher who corrected Newton's own heirs on the measure of force, wrote a philosophy of happiness for the excluded, and produced the French translation of Newton's Principia that is still the standard one — racing her own death to finish it.