Emilie du Châtelet and her work on Newton's Principia
narratively.com
narratively.com
So no, it wasn't just a translation of the principia. It seems she was also a philosopher and an early financial pioneer in developing financial derivatives.
Still, making a good translation can require deep understanding of the subject and offers plenty of opportunity for scientific discovery. The translator can be one of the first few to understand an important work. I think most people would agree that understanding an important work early can be advantageous. At least a few of the scientific contributions I've made were motivated by things I translated, as appears to also be the case for Émilie du Châtelet.
An acquaintance of mine in linguistics told me that translations are treated as roughly equivalent to a conference paper in linguistics, where journal articles are considered first-class. I think this setup is better than the status-quo in engineering, CS, physics, or math where translations are often treated as a waste of time.
Today, most science is published in English, but for problems which have existed for a long time, it can be worthwhile to consult the foreign "archival literature" for important papers that haven't been translated or appreciated. (Or even digitized, frequently!)
Edit: If there's a particular paper you're interested in finding a translation of, I'd recommend looking at this Stack Exchange post I made about locating existing translations: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/93209/31143
Furthermore:
"Her commentary includes a profound contribution to Newtonian mechanics—the postulate of an additional conservation law for total energy, of which kinetic energy of motion is one element. This led to her conceptualization of energy as such, and to derive its quantitative relationships to the mass and velocity of an object."
> du Châtelet took the idiosyncratic mathematical proofs relating to the laws of attraction that had been most scrutinized by Newton’s critics and recast his geometrical equations into integral calculus.
This is an important point vis-a-vis the history of calculus. Newton used a geometric formulation of calculus. The continent, meanwhile, and eventually everyone else, use Liebniz’s formulation of calculus. That engendered a something of a divide that kept people on the continent from crediting Newton’s work. In addressing criticisms of Newton’s work, du Chatelet redid Newton’s equations using Liebniz’s formulation of calculus. It’s not necessarily click bait to say that was transformative, given that a lot of subsequent development of calculus and physics happened in France.
Yes. For instance, it's almost certain that Joseph Fourier would have studied du Châtelet's work.
Newton did not use equations in his book, it was all done geometrically and with proportions.
Correct, in the sense that there's no explicit equality sign and the left and right side of the expression. There are expressions though (I see them e.g. in Book II).
But what surely nobody would find there is calculus as we know it today, all explanations are indeed geometrical there.
So rayner's claim "Newton used a geometric formulation of calculus" can be accepted (although the "calculus" was not explicit at all, but just a hidden "guiding line"), and even more that it was an immense work reinterpreting Newton's ideas to something easier to follow and prove (to those equipped with the knowledge of Leibniz's notation).
From the article we comment:
"du Châtelet took the idiosyncratic mathematical proofs relating to the laws of attraction that had been most scrutinized by Newton’s critics and recast his geometrical equations into integral calculus."
Her "commentary" should surely be considered one of fundamental "On The Shoulders of Giants" set of texts.
(Btw: it's "Leibniz" or "Leibnitz". The "ie" is a sure typo.)
(One more warning, as if the other reactions weren't enough: the page on the site is structured so that when seen in Firefox reader view (at least in my case) one gets a totally different story! (the one from here: https://narratively.com/the-secret-revenge-of-an-assault-sur... I haven't analyzed how that substitution happen). The story should be about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89milie_du_Ch%C3%A2telet )
So did Leibniz. What do you think he meant by dx and dy? :)
The article is about science and social norms, no so much about Newton's work.
But. Amazing.
If I were you, I'd retain some aspect of the "race against the clock before your probable untimely death which you know is soon coming" portion. Some baitiness is unavoidable when that's the story.
The misogynist trolls will probably flock to a comment section like this regardless, if there's something about a female technologist or scientist in the title. I think removing the old title is kind of letting them win.
Part of the experiment of HN is to learn, together, how to calm ourselves down so we can find the quieter sort of material genuinely interesting again. There's plenty that's interesting here.
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22199116.)
The story. Well cultural shock a bit and sympathy a bit, and equal opportunity concern a bit;
... but not that interesting. Sorry. Did fall into the bait though :-)
Who do you think you are to rudely lecture people who may be more qualified than yourself?
You are the one who is constantly rude here.
I'm sorry to come across as rude, mindless, and dictatorial. That's definitely not the intention. The intention is to prevent HN threads from getting stuck in local flamewar states that tend to burn like garbage fires and give off fumes rather than information. That's a big problem on a site like this—in fact it's the biggest problem on a site like this. It doesn't, alas, mean that we make every call correctly. If you read lopmotr's GP comment in isolation and without the flamewar problem in mind, it is probably fine.
I knew nothing of her until a few minutes ago and it's really a shame that one of the first comments in this thread isn't going into more detail about her contributions but rather incuriously dismisses her.
Using hyperbolic click bait titles is a political statement, it's basically a Tweet as a HN submission. If you want to be less generous: it's trolling, and if done as a comment, it would get moderated and the account banned if it's a pattern.
You could link an article about Lincoln titled "Abraham Lincoln's struggle with X" or "The Republican that fought the Democrats to end SLAVERY and how he overcame his greatest challenge". Guess what title will lead to comments on the topic and which will result in a political shouting match.
I think the article is being overly dramatic with her race against death as well. The life expectancy number is completely irrelevant. The overall figure doesn’t matter. Once you’ve made it to 20 years old your life expectancy was probably in the 70s-ish even at that time.
Maternal death in childhood looked to be about 0.3%. Current stats say about x8 for women over 40, so let’s say x20 for those times... 6%? Non trivial for sure. And yes, she did die. But far from a death sentence.