Born on December 17

Émilie du Châtelet (1706-1749) was a French physicist and mathematician of the Enlightenment. She translated and annotated Newton's Principia Mathematica, a work that remained the standard French reference until the 19th century. Voltaire's companion, she demonstrated that kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity.

British mathematician and pioneer of dynamical systems theory. Her work on nonlinear differential equations foreshadowed chaos theory. She was the first woman mathematician elected to the Royal Society.

Mary Kenneth Keller was an American Catholic nun and a computing pioneer. She was one of the first people to earn a doctorate in computer science in the United States (1965) and contributed to the development of the BASIC programming language.