Interesting -- somewhat dry -- account of Emilie du Chatelet’s and Voltaire’s relationship during the Enlightenment; I'd seen the play Legacy of Light based on this book, so I picked it up at the theater and read it afterward. Emilie is worth getting to know, if you don't already know her: a brilliant female mathematician who maintained a relationship with Voltaire, who everyone knows. I like reading about the eighteenth century, and the author clearly researched a great deal to produce this fascinating little book!

This is the best kind of biography. If you know a reasonable amount already, it gives you lots of detail, but if you didn't then it fills it all in without any fuss. I got more out of this than if it had been my first trajectory across the Enlightenment, but if it had been, I'd still have been fine. I was completely ignorant of Emilie's contribitions to science, and it explained them brilliantly.

Beyond that, well, Emilie du Chatelet is awesome and there's lots of lovely Voltaire gossip. It's nice to read a book that has Voltaire in that isn't by somebody who thinks he's the best thing ever, but also doesn't hate him. It's interesting how passionate everyone's emotions about Voltaire tend to be still.

There never were people who deserved guillotining like the French aristocrats of the ancien regime.

A real treat, well worth it.

The history isn't all that rigorous, and Bodanis hammers the living crap out of you with his point, but the story is terrific and well-told; yeah, this is worth a look.

A well-written, incredibly interesting biography of two fascinating people.

A fascinating and riveting account of the intertwined lives of Emilie du Chatelet and Voltaire. Two brilliant minds who have been hugely influential on the development of the enlightenment and scientific thought, though in the case of Emilie her staggering contribution to science was largely forgotten or attributed to others until recently. Emilie seems to have lived her life with an extra-ordinary intensity especially in the last few months as she anticipated that she would not survive the birth of her third child and fought against time to complete her reworking of Newton's principia.

Their intertwined lives are brimming with incidents that one would struggle to credit if written in a novel. David Bodanis has brought them both back to vivid life and also in the process brought to life the world of C18 France and the reign of Louis XV.

Émilie du Châtelet is a name that never came up during my physics studies. Passionate Minds sets the record straight and reveals Émilie’s status as a significant thinker from the early 18th century who anticipated the discovery of infrared radiation and introduced the concept of conservation of energy (as distinct from momentum). Émilie was responsible for a translation and extensive commentary of Newton’s Principia using less clunky mathematics that set the stage for the work of Euler and Lagrange, and also generally made important contributions to enlightenment thinking along with her romantic partner Voltaire at their château at Cirey. She was Voltaire’s intellectual superior when it came to math and science.

This book on Émilie and Voltaire’s partnership is meticulously researched, and it is fascinating how many details can be reconstructed from their life. (To give just one example, in the end notes Bodanis clarifies that he cross-checked with the lunar calendar and the layout of a particular room to give a description of light from a full moon falling onto the head of Émilie’s bed on a particular day.) Even for those not interested in the science, this would be a great book to read to get a sense of the everyday life of the intellectual elite in France during the early 18th century. Personally, I learned a lot about the role of class (Voltaire came from a lower class than Émilie and this colors some of their interactions) as well as the growing movement towards individuality and privacy, the proliferation of personal letters and the beginnings of the press. The societal tolerance of long-term extramarital affairs up to a point (even by a married woman) was also interesting.

By pure chance I read Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds by Bernard de Fontenelle earlier this year and was struck by de Fontenelle’s open-mindedness towards the education of women in astronomy even in the late 17th century. It was lovely to see him appear in this story as a mentor to Émilie throughout her life beginning at a young age.

While it was surprising to see the extent to which Émilie was accepted as a thinker during her time (even if her role was somewhat suppressed after her death), it was also tough reading about the huge disadvantages she faced due to her gender. For example, she and Voltaire entered a prize competition put on by the Academy of Sciences and both received honorary mentions, except she had to pretend to help Voltaire with his entry during the day while staying up late at night to work in secret on her own. If she had been able to openly use the equipment he ordered (for the experiments he botched) she may have been able to verify her theory and even detect infrared radiation. In general Voltaire doesn’t come across so well here, even if he must have been more open-minded about the education of women than many of his contemporaries; Émilie wasted a significant amount of time stroking his ego whenever she outperformed him. And he was not the only man to react this way to her brilliance. I won’t spoil the ending, but it is tragic and reveals the second class status of women on multiple levels.

My main complaint about the book is that while it gives a reasonable introduction to Émilie’s science and thinking, I wish it had put a larger weight on this compared to details of the affairs she had with famous men. I also think some of the science and history of science could have been even more clearly explained. To what extent was Émilie’s proposal of conservation of energy novel rather than implicit in Newton’s work? Also, Bodanis writes at the beginning that she is responsible for the squared in Einstein’s equation E=mc^2, but he never returns to explain this. I assume he is referring to her clarification of the concept of kinetic energy and how it differs from momentum, however this way of phrasing it is a bit misleading (rest energy is different from kinetic energy — or is he taking m to be the relativistic mass which includes a factor of gamma?). I doubt it would be clear to a layperson what Bodanis means, at least not without reading one of his other books.

All in all though, I think this is an excellent and well-researched book that is certainly worth reading to learn about the enlightenment and the scientific contributions of a brilliant but forgotten woman from that time period.

Note: I’m following Bodanis’s convention of calling Émilie by her first name (as opposed to the name she received by marriage) and Voltaire by his last name (which he chose for himself).

Story of Emilie du Chatelet, possibly one of the greatest mathematical minds in France in the early Enlightenment era. Also happened to be Voltaire's lover. The book tackles math concepts, literature, and class structure, while still giving a particular account of one woman's life.

Engaging style. Story ranges all over, yet feels focused. Definitely makes you glad not to live in pre-Revolution France.

A very well crafted biography of two lovers -- and two great minds -- that paved the way for the Enlightenment. We know the poet, Voltaire, he of the great Candide, among his many other works. Much less is known about his lifelong companion and on-again, off-again lover, Emilie du Chatelet, an educated and brilliant scientist whose work on Newton help paved the way for an entire century of scientists.

Set in the early 18th Century, the biography reads like a romance, a history text, and a volume of hard science rolled together in a pleasing and thoughtful narrative that never slows or loses its momentum. Voltaire is a captivating character, and a thoroughly modern one as well. (One would only wonder what he would have done with a twitter account) His achievements follow the many valleys in his life, and its good to see that Bodanis does not skim over the great writer's many faults.

As for his partner, there's sadness here, unavoidable as we look at what du Chatelet went through during a time when most women were only marginally educated and pushed to the edges of society. And yet, throughout the book we sense her commitment, both to her work and her desire for freedom, and it lingers well after the book is over.

More than anything, it is the sense of human possibility that drives the book forward. Much like the Enlightenment that will follow them in the years to come. Bodanis is on firm ground here, with protagonists who left behind numerous letters and written accounts of their work and actions, and he does the story right by focusing on the lesser known du Chatelet. She is something of a tragic figure, but her fierceness and vulnerability leap off the pages, and when the book ends, we can't help but wonder about our own commitment. Our own goals.

Throughout their lives, Voltaire and Emilie served as a shining example to their culture that life need not be lived a certain way. That the church and the king and the aristocracy could not and would not dictate what they did and how they did it. That doesn't seem like much now, but in a time when poets like Voltaire could (and were) thrown in prison for writing uncomplimentary rhymes about the monarchy, their stubborn resistance left a legacy to the generations that followed. A legacy that even now, is one we should never forget.

I absolutely loved this book. Bodanis provides readers with fascinating information on Emilie du Chatelet - who I had never heard of, but everyone should get to know! The story is so well written that it is easy to get lost in Emilie and Voltaire's lives. The way Bodanis presents his research allows readers to gain an in-depth understanding of French society in the early 18th century, while simultaneously getting to know two of the key players in the early years of the Enlightenment on a very personal level. Definitely recommend it!!

brilliantly written, more engaging than 99% of popular history, narrated with a humaneness & eye for narrative that's perfectly suited to the subject. this is such an extraordinarily warm book, with such a sense of brightness and wonder about it, this genuine awe for the enlightenment project that i can't imagine its subjects being anything but proud of. i was crying at the end. what a valuable and moving thing to have read.

Really fascinating history and easy and entertaining to read!

As I sit watching religious fanatics bring the enlightenment to an end I can't help reading things about the enlightenment and regretting witnessing the end of that great project. I've a friend who is much more obsessed with this than I am, but obsessed I am and will probably remain.

This is a book born from another book - E=mc2. This is a much better book than that, but the part about Emilie du Chatelet in E=mc2 was probably the best bit in that book too. This book would have been improved by incorporating more of that chapter into this. I think the author was afraid of repeating himself - but not everyone would read both books and this book lost out by not explaining her contribution to proving Newton wrong.

What a woman - how could Voltaire not have fall in love with her? He was a fool to ever lose her. Simple as that. Voltaire comes out of this book rather badly, to be honest.

She comes out perhaps a little too well, can she really have been so saintly? To be a woman who proved Newton wrong - remembering that the French Revolutionaries wanted to start the new calendar from his birthday - ought to have made her a god. That she seems little remembered is a crime.

This is a truly fascinating story of a woman, an intellectual, a revolutionary thinker and a scientist, at a time when women had no right to be any of these things. Most men had no right to be any of these things either.

The story of her all too early death is tragic and a reminder of how fortunate we are to live at a time of modern science when the words child birth and 40 don't strike fear into the hearts of women.

A fascinating account of a pair of fascinating people.