Emilie du Chatelet

Emilie du Chatelet argued, against the physics of her time, that the quantity conserved in a moving body is proportional to mass times velocity squared rather than to velocity alone, an early statement of what became the concept of kinetic energy. Her French translation of Newton's Principia Mathematica, published after her death in 1749, remains the standard French edition today, and in 1738 she became the first woman to have a paper published by the French Academy of Sciences, a study of the nature of fire.