I listened to the In Our Time episode on Émilie du Châtelet, who is way up there in my personal pantheon, and Melvyn made it mainly about how nice it was of Voltaire to acknowledge her in his Elémens de la philosophie de Neuton.

She literally explained Newtonian physics to him.

And it felt weirdly personal, because I love the idea of physics, but I have to call my sister when Fourteen has algebra homework.

It would be like me publishing Elements of Surviving Homeschooling, which S. mainly does anyway because I’m useless, and giving both a footnote.

Du Châtelet, as the contributors tried to explain, also developed her own calculus, which may have been influenced by Leibniz, but which was to her a simple necessity since Newton had left so many hand-waving holes in the sacrosanct Principia.

And this is all beside the fact that she was sheltering him from the court of Louis XIV the whole time, and from his own tendency to set himself magnificently on fire.

So, that bullshit quote of his that everyone trots out? It was du Châtelet who did all the defending.