Sophie Germain was born in Paris on April 1, 1776. Her family was very wealthy and her dad worked as a merchant. She became interested in math when she was a teenager because she read a book about Archimedes death. She learned mathematics in her fathers library. When she was 18 she went to a obtained lecture notes from a academy that taught math and science and was called Ecole Polytechnique .

She met a man named J.L. Lagrange who was to become her mentor after she submitted a paper to him. Its good to have a male to introduce her to people because she would be accepted much easier. Then she became a pen pal with a man by the name of Carl Gauss because of his work in number theory which she did also. She entered a contest that a academy made for someone to explain the underlaying mathematical...