A FRENCH CONNECTION

Émilie du Châtelet (left) engaged two of Johann Bernoulli’s best students to tutor her and in 1749 completed a landmark French translation of Principia, adding a commentary in which she had reworked a selection of Newton’s geometrical proofs in Leibnizian calculus. It was through this kind of “Leibnizian” translation that “Newtonian” mechanics really took off. In yet another irony, it was a self-taught woman, Mary Somerville, who wrote the textbook (Mechanism of the Heavens) that eventually brought these Continental developments of Newton’s legacy to British (all-male) university students.