In the lavish and rigid court of 18th-century France, Émilie du Châtelet defied every limitation imposed on women of her class. Born in 1706 to the principal secretary of King Louis XIV, she bypassed the standard convent education when her father recognized her staggering intellect, hiring the head of the French Academy of Sciences to tutor her in astronomy at just ten years old. By her teenage years, she was counting cards to fund her collection of expensive mathematics textbooks, and though she fulfilled her noble obligations through an arranged marriage, she eventually negotiated an autonomous lifestyle to pursue theoretical physics. Shut out from the male-only Parisian Café Gradot—the intellectual epicenter of the Enlightenment—she ordered a custom suit of men's clothing to slip past guards and join scientific debates. Later, while residing w ...