Her mathematics helped make the Eiffel Tower possible, yet when Gustave Eiffel engraved 72 names of great French scientists on its sides, hers was missing, left off because she was a woman. Her death certificate listed her not as a scientist but as a “property holder.” Sophie Germain, the self-taught genius of elasticity theory, spent her whole life locked out of the rooms her work would hold up.

This episode follows the 13-year-old who read about Archimedes dying for a math problem during the chaos of the French Revolution and took it as an endorsement, the parents who confiscated her candles and warm clothes to stop her studying, and the alias Monsieur LeBlanc that got her homework in front of the great Lagrange. It covers her work on Fermat’s Last Theorem, the six grueling years on elasticity, and the 2026 announcement that Paris will finally carve her name into the tower’s iron.

• Calculus under the quilts: the candle-confiscating parents and a mother’s secret supply line
• Becoming Monsieur LeBlanc: the borrowed identity that fooled the Ecole Polytechnique
• Climbing over the maze: how a lack of formal training produced both errors and breakthroughs
• Gauss, Fermat, and elasticity: the correspondence and prize work that built modern engineering
• 140 years late: the Eiffel Tower snub and the 2026 plan to finally add her name