Germain, Sophie

Sophie Germain, in full Marie-Sophie Germain, (born April 1, 1776, Paris, France—died June 27, 1831, Paris), French mathematician who contributed notably to the study of acoustics, elasticity, and the theory of numbers.

As a girl Germain read widely in her father’s library and then later, using the pseudonym of M. Le Blanc, managed to obtain lecture notes for courses from the newly organized École Polytechnique in Paris. It was through the École Polytechnique that she met the mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange, who remained a strong source of support and encouragement to her for several years. Germain’s early work was in number theory, her interest having been stimulated by Adrien-Marie Legendre’s Théorie des nombres (1789) and by Carl Friedrich Gauss’s Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (1801). This subject occupied her throughout her life and eventually provided her most significant result. In 1804 she initiated a correspondence with Gauss under her male pseudonym. Gauss only learned of her true identity when Germain, fearing for Gauss’s safety as a result of the French occupation of Hannover in 1807, asked a family friend in the French army to ascertain his whereabouts and ensure that he would not be ill-treated.

In 1809 the French Academy of Sciences offered a prize for a mathematical account of the phenomena exhibited in experiments on vibrating plates conducted by the German physicist Ernst F.F. Chladni. In 1811 Germain submitted an anonymous memoir, but the prize was not awarded. The competition was reopened twice more, once in 1813 and again in 1816, and Germain submitted a memoir on each occasion. Her third memoir, with which she finally won the prize, treated vibrations of general curved as well as plane surfaces and was published privately in 1821. During the 1820s she worked on generalizations of her research but, isolated from the academic community on account of her gender and thus largely unaware of new developments taking place in the theory of elasticity, she made little real progress. In 1816 Germain met Joseph Fourier, whose friendship and position in the Academy helped her to participate more fully in Parisian scientific life, but his reservations about her work on elasticity eventually led him to distance himself from her professionally, although they remained close friends.

Meanwhile Germain had actively revived her interest in number theory and in 1819 wrote to Gauss outlining her strategy for a general solution to Fermat’s last theorem, which states that there is no solution for the equation xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ if n is an integer greater than 2 and x, y, and z are nonzero integers. She proved the special case in which x, y, z, and n are all relatively prime (have no common divisor except for 1) and n is a prime smaller than 100, although she did not publish her work. Her result first appeared in 1825 in a supplement to the second edition of Legendre’s Théorie des nombres. She corresponded extensively with Legendre, and her method formed the basis for his proof of the theorem for the case n = 5. The theorem was proved for all cases by the English mathematician Andrew Wiles in 1995.

Germain found that she had breast cancer in 1829, and she died from it two years later. That year, Gauss had arranged for her to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Göttingen, but she died before it could be awarded.