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Feature: Inspired by Mathematics — Sophie Germain
How often have you sat in class with a notebook open, and a teacher up front in a middle of a monologue? If you are awake, you take down anxiously what’s being said and put on the blackboard. Even though it doesn’t make much sense, you take down everything for fear of missing something important — things that could appear in the exam.
This is more so with subjects generally considered ‘difficult’, and that’s so for reasons of poor experience in the past or the lack of an inspiring teacher. Difficulty in understanding often leads to hatred. But there is a way to avoid this negative outlook.
Here’s how to do it: seek inspiration independently for the subject that seem boring to you. Study the life story of people who, against great odds, achieved success. Mathematics, often viewed as ‘dry’ and ‘difficult’ by our students, has an amazing list of inspiring living and historical figures whose lives can make the subject come alive and inspire you to find something new and interesting. Near home, the most wonderful model mathematician is Ramanujan, the Indian genius.
In this article we will only look at the remarkable Sophie Germain and leave you explore other interesting mathematicians using the Net at the site: http://tinyurl.com/evx4. This site contains biographies of over a thousand mathematicians and has other interesting sections on the history of mathematics.
Unfortunately, the way history is taught often makes it a boring subject too. You ought to use it as a means to inspire you in other subjects such as mathematics. It can then become a valuable resource in its own right.
Sophie was born in 1776 in Paris, a daughter of a rich merchant shortly before the French Revolution. During the turbulent times she busied herself in her dad’s library. It was there that she read about the tragic death of Archimedes, perhaps the greatest scientist of antiquity. It was this romantic story that turned her towards mathematics.
Archimedes is supposed to have been busy sitting on the ground studying geometrical figures, unaware of the Roman attack on Syracuse, his city. A rude soldier came and stomped over what the great man was drawing. He requested the trespasser to move off. There upon the incensed soldier drew his sword and executed the seventy five year old mathematician.
Sophie wanted to devote her life to such a subject. It would allow her to be so deeply engrossed in so as not to be disturbed by the brutality that was being perpetrated during the Reign of Terror.
Doing mathematics wasn’t easy as her middle class parents felt, that women should not bother themselves with numbers. This was common thinking at that time. [It is important to think of and list similar prejudices that still affect our society two hundred years on.] Her books were hidden, her room light and heat turned off to prevent her from teaching herself mathematics. But she persevered using a secret collection of candles to study in the middle of the night. After she defeated her parents’ opposition through heroic persistence they came to tolerate her love for mathematics and eventually support it. Sophie neither married nor obtained a professional position but her father supported her financially throughout her life.
She contributed notably to the study of acoustics, elasticity, and the theory of numbers. Her most fruitful contribution was the limited proof of Fermat’s last theorem for the case in which x, y, z are not divisible by an odd prime; the theorem 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. The theorem was proved for all cases by the English mathematician Andrew Wiles in 1995. (A prime number is an integer that is divisible only by 1 and itself, e.g. 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on. All primes are odd, except 2. The history of Fermat’s last theorem is most fascinating and attracted the best mathematicians for the last 300 years, and worthy of a separate article.)
Sophie mastered calculus through self-study and took correspondence courses from the Icole Polytechnique, Paris, which did not allow women in the school itself. Her 1816 theoretical paper explaining the experimental findings of vibrating plates was awarded a prize by the Institut de France.
Sophie was a friend of the eminent mathematicians Joseph-Louis Lagrange of France and Carl Friedrich Gauss of Germany, with whom she corresponded under the pseudonym M. Leblanc before revealing her identity. She was so highly esteemed by Gauss, one of the all-time greats, that he recommended her for an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Gvttingen. She died at age 52 from breast cancer before the degree could be awarded.
Mathematics is a subject often considered difficult by girl students globally, and more so in Pakistan. Apart from the inability of teachers to make the subject come alive, there is a reluctance of parents to encourage their girls to study and master the analytical subjects. Given these hurdles it is important that they find models such as Sophie Germain on the Internet. In addition, websites such as http://mathforum.org/ can lead to areas of mathematics that can be very exciting.
The wonderful world of mathematics can open up for young people who are willing to seek new avenues for inspiration. These may be no further than the PC connected to the internet!
QID is a physicist and writes on education, science, environment and IT. He is with the Beaconhouse National University in Lahore.
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