Keynote Addresses and Conferences 

In this lecture I trace events in the process of becoming a woman natural philosopher and mathematician. My narrative inquiry revolves around the archive of Émilie Du Châtelet. The central argument of the lecture is that du Châtelet's engagement with science is   a pure event, free of all normal, or normative causality around what it meant to be a women in her geographies and times.  That is to say, what defines Chatelet’s becoming a scientist  is difficult to be explained by simply analysing economic, political or socio-cultural conditions.  However, it happened:  du Châtelet and other women began to think of themselves – their relation to themselves and to others – differently.  And it is this subjective redeployment, this all-too-difficult to understand event, that is the only explanation we have for du Chatelet’s becoming.  Although this new subjectivity must have come about through a series of subtle and imperceptible adjustments, it nevertheless explodes onto the scene: du Chatelet and other women scientists suddenly imagined and indeed demanded a society that would match their new subjectivity.

Abstract

In 1816, Sophie Germain became the first woman to win the Grand Prix de Mathématiques, awarded by the Class of Mathematics and Physics of the French Institute for her theory of vibrations of general curved and plane elastic surfaces. And yet she did not attend the ceremony award, due to a malfunction of receiving the award letter together with her tickets for the ceremony. What she received instead was a cold letter at the eleventh hour advising her that she was invited to attend, which she did not. In considering the letter that Germain never received as a sign of the times, in this paper I look into the role of mathematical correspondence in both including and excluding women from the world of science during the early modern period and beyond. My approach draws on archival research with Germain’s mathematical correspondence in the Archives and Manuscripts of La Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) and at the Biblioteca Moreniana de Firenze and emerges from a wider project of writing a feminist genealogy of automathographies, which is funded by the Leverhulme Trust.