Sophie Germain

French mathematician who taught herself from her father's library after being barred, as a woman, from the Ecole Polytechnique, and corresponded with Lagrange, Legendre and Gauss under the male pseudonym Monsieur Antoine-Auguste Le Blanc before her identity was revealed. She proved a significant partial result toward Fermat's Last Theorem for a broad class of prime exponents (Sophie Germain primes are named for the special primes her method uses), and her work on elasticity theory won the Paris Academy of Sciences' prize competition on vibrating elastic surfaces, the first woman awarded a prize by the Academy.