The International Centre for Mathematical Sciences and Oxford Mathematics are hosting a public event celebrating the life and work of Sophie Germain, one of the first female scholars to be awarded a major research prize in mathematics.
Bristol researcher Laura Monk will take part in a celebration of the life and work of Sophie Germain, a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. An event for the public will be held at the Faraday Theatre at the Royal Institution, London, to mark the 250th birthday of Sophie Germain. Laura’s talk will explain the groundbreaking work that Sophie did that led her to win a prise from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her work on elasticity.
Laura remarked “I am pleased to be sharing the work of an inspirational woman. I was surprised when I was asked to give this lecture, as I was (sadly) completely unaware of Sophie Germain's contributions to the history of my field. This is particularly concerning as Sophie Germain solved a problem I very regularly present in talks: she provided the mathematical model which describes the vibrations of a 2D plate.
The challenge here is that, contrarily to 1D strings, 2D objects do not admit one single notion of curvature. Mathematicians today use two distinct numbers to describe the curvature of a 2D object: the Gaussian curvature and the mean curvature. The two notions were introduced within a few years of each other, the first one (as the name suggests) by Gauss and the latter (as the name forgets) by Sophie Germain. She correctly identified the mean curvature as the relevant quantity in the vibration problem and spent years providing more and more convincing justifications for her insightful hypothesis. It has been an immense pleasure to read her work, and I am looking forward to sharing her beautiful ideas on her birthday (and for the rest of my career!).”
Laura’s talk will take place on 1 April at “Primes and Resonance: Sophie Germain’s 250th Birthday.” The event is open to a general audience, and all lectures will also be made available on YouTube by Wednesday 29 April. For more information, see the Sophie Germain event website.