Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749) was a French mathematician, physicist and author. Voltaire, one of her lovers, declared in a letter to his friend King Frederick II of Prussia that du Châtelet was “a great man whose only fault was being a woman”. Laura Bassi (1711-1778) was an Italian scientist. She received a doctoral degree from the University of Bologna in May 1732, only the third academic qualification ever bestowed on a woman by a European university, and the first woman to earn a professorship in physics at a university in Europe. Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799) was an Italian mathematician and philosopher and the second woman ever to be granted professorship … Continue reading Émilie du Châtelet, Laura Bassi, Maria Gaetana Agnesi