GERMAIN Sophie Mémoire sur l’emploi de l’épaisseur dans la théorie des surfaces élastiques.

DSB, V, 375-376.

First edition, posthumous.

Offprint from : Journal de Mathématiques pures et appliquées, 3rd series, volume VI, 1880.

Sophie Germain (1776-1831) was the most famous French mathematician of the 19^th century. She kept up an important correspondence with Legendre and Gauss.

“Sophie Germain, France’s greatest female mathematician prior to the present era… After teaching herself Latin and Greek, she read Newton and Euler despite her parent’s opposition to a career in mathematics… Correspondence with great scholars became the means by which she obtained her higher education in mathematics, literature, biology, and philosophy…One of Sophie Germain’s theorems is related to the baffling and still unsolved problem of obtaining a general proof of ‘Fermat’s last theorem’… Parallel with and subsequent to her pure mathematical research she also made contributions to the applied mathematics of acoustics and elasticity” (DSB).

“The appearance in print of Sophie Germain’s Mémoire sur l’emploi de l’épaisseur dans la théorie des surfaces élastiques (Paris, Gauthier-Villars, 1880) followed Stupuy’s publication of her Œuvres philosophiques in 1879. The cover page of Sophie Germain’s manuscript, which until 1879 had been closeted away Prony’s papers in the Archives de l’École des Ponts et Chaussées, indicates that Poisson alone had perused the work. Her manuscript is now held at the Archives of the Academy of Sciences, Paris” (Bucciarelli, An Essay in the History of the Theory of Elasticity, p. 141).

Publisher’s inscription on cover “[à] Monsieur le baron de Blainvilliers, conseiller à la cour des comptes, hommage de l’éditeur”.

Some missing part on cover, and top cover detached.