Marquise Du Chatelet

I am presently reading La Dame d'Esprit: A Biography of the Marquise Du Chatelet by Judith P. Zinsser. Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Chatelet (1706-1749), was the patron, mistress, and intellectual companion of Voltaire. In the first decades of the French Enlightment, although barred from even the most informal gathering of learned men because of her sex, she wrote on the nature of fire, light, and the cosmos. Her translation of Isaac Newton's Principia remains the authoritative French version to this day. Incredible! Her mastery of the new calculus was a skill shared by only a dozen or so others in 1740's Europe. Judith P. Zinsser is an exceptional historian.