#EmilieDuChatelet

“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.”

“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.”