Her work was a translation of Newton's Principia into French? That's good and all, but it's not scientific discovery. It's understandable that she's not widely recognized if she didn't make any important discoveries.
Could you stop your mindless dictatorial attitude? The title says "work on Newton's Principia", which suggests at least minor original contributions to the work itself.
Who do you think you are to rudely lecture people who may be more qualified than yourself?
I changed the title after that comment was posted—first to "translation of", and then to "work on" because https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22199282 argued—apparently reasonably—that she made contributions beyond translation. "Working on X" is standard English for a scholar studying something. It doesn't imply that they're adding to X itself. Harold Bloom worked on Shakespeare, but not even he would say that he contributed to Shakespeare's plays.
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.
Her work was a translation of Principia into French ... in a society which excluded her from many of the academic resources that male translators would have had access to at the time, completed under a grueling schedule, with annotations, including her own original contribution in extending Newtonian mechanics with a law of overall conservation of energy. Her work went on to be one of the foundational texts of the French Enlightenment.
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.
RE dismissal: if you politicize everything, be ready for everyone to answer according to their politics.
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.
Yeah... reading the article I don’t see any mention of the impact it had. Principia had been out for over 60 years at the time.
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.
I think it’s a relevant comment. The article does very little to explain what she did that was useful. The Wikipedia article... sort of suggests her comments were more impactful but it’s hard to assess that claim.
The article even adds
> Eventually, there was nowhere to turn but back to “her Newton,” as she affectionately started calling it. She found the proofs “very boring” and the commentary “very difficult,”
Which doesn’t do the work any favor. Without any intent to slight women’s contributions or ability to contribute to science, I didn’t get the sense that this was a hugely important work.
The titles claim that she transformed physics sounds egregiously overstated in that regard.
