Talk:Nicole-Reine Lepaute

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Possible Edits

I'd like to add some details about Nicole's personal life as well as all of her accomplishments as a female mathematician in the 1700s. I feel like she is an amazing person and want to show the world more about her. NoetherIsLikeNoOther (talk) 01:15, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

née

The article opens with

Nicole-Reine Lepaute (née Étable de la Briere...)

When I first glanced at this, I thought the (first) name she was given at birth was "Étable", surnamed "de la Briere". On reading further, it appears that actually "Étable de la Briere" was the full surname, which is of course perfectly in line with the standard way of using née.

Still, it's potentially confusing, especially since the name "Etable" doesn't appear till the second section, not prominently, and is given there without the accent aigu and without the "de la Briere". Is there a way we can make this easier to follow? Maybe an explanatory footnote? --Trovatore (talk) 18:58, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Hi!

I'm putting an infobox with "born Nicole-Reine Étable de la Brière", that should do the trick! Tsiluciole (talk) 09:08, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Infobox and additions

Hi! I'm going to see what I can do to make the page a bit cleaner on some aspects, like adding an infobox and seeing what information I can find in French to add. It's really nice to see women astronomers and I want the page to look better still using my knowledge of French. Tsiluciole (talk) 08:07, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

God that was a mess.

Seeker's article did not make mention of Nicole Lepaute even once.

Credoreference gave a link to lorem ipsum.

Lalande biography was quoted twice, under different links, one google doc, one archive. I used it as the main source. The encyclopedias you need an account for said the Treatise of Clockmaking was 1775, but according to him, it was 1755.

Apart from that, the date supposedly given in the New Atlantis wasn't there, but in the Kilo-Girls article, and it was 1758, not 1759.

Venus' ephemeris did not happen in 1759, but 1761.

None of the sources said she constructed clocks with her husband, only that she calculated and described them.

The ephemerides she made were from 1774 till the year 1792, and she stopped doing them in 1783. She went near-blind from the work, which is not mentioned in the personal life.

Accents were not properly put.

I honestly have no idea how all these mistakes happened but I hope the edit I'll put soon will clear that. Tsiluciole (talk) 11:20, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

Other errors: the marriage date is false.

I saw no mention of that year 1767 for when she took care of her husband.

I saw Hartense absolutely nowhere and the Observatory explicitly says that the Larousse remarked that Hortensia comes from Hortus, and so is not her name. Tsiluciole (talk) 11:44, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

Done!

Alright, so.

First thing first: I put an infobox.

• I added some pîctures of her calculation tables. It could be pertinent to add a picture of the map of the 1764 eclipse, but that's under her works, or of the comet.
• I added some references: Saggi, the article from Elisabeth Connor. The two Ephemerides are there for evidence of what she did on those. An article for the fate of her nephew was also added, and some archive naming the hortensia Peautia, to contrast the Lepautia in Lynn. I found those on the French wikipedia.
• I made sure to reference it every time a source said something.
• I put some more accent on the weight of her work, the toll it took on her and her relative lack of recognition. Whenever possible, I strived to include a gallica link to what she did, so that people may find them. I think the original article didn't precise that she worked on parallactic angles or that there were two maps, too.
• There doesn't seem to be any evidence towards hortensia coming from anything else than hortus, so I changed the article to reflect that.
• I removed some articles: the first one, which wasn't relevant to Lepaute, the encyclopedias which didn't provide any relevant information apart from a wrong date (1775 for the traité, contradicting Lalande), and the Kilo Girls article (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/computing-power-used-to-be-measured-in-kilo-girls/280633/) which had a wrong date (the comet came back in 1759). I'm going to make an edit after this post cause I found a copy of the book I had removed on google books. There lacks some critical pages but it's better than needed a subscription.
• Concerning the place of death, it's Paris in the Saint-Roch parish. I added the death certificate found in the Paris archives to archive.org and included it as reference. It's a primary source, though. Our only secondary source on that says she died in Saint-Cloud...

Possible points of improvement:

• Putting the map that is on gallica as a picture on wikicommons so it's shown, as it might be more visually appealing than a table of astronomical calculations
• Clarifying the story of the hortensia

Please let me know if I made any mistake! Tsiluciole (talk) 16:43, 12 November 2022 (UTC)