Реши задачи по этому тексту: A Life with Numbers Imagine telling Einstein to stop studying physics. Imagine telling Picasso to stop painting. Could they stop doing the things they loved? This is what people tried to do to Sophie Germain. Sophie's love was mathematics. She fell in love with it when she was only 13 years old. She found a book about Archimedes and his love of geometry in her father's library. Then she read all the books about math she could find and decided to become a mathematician. There were two problems. First, Sophie was born in eighteenth-century France. Second, she was a girl from a middle-class family. It was very unusual for girls from the middle class to study math in the 18th century. Sophie's parents wanted her to be like other girls. When she studied math, they tried to stop her. But Sophie studied secretly at night, by candlelight, when her parents slept. Finally, her parents decided to let Sophie study. It was too hard to stop her! When Sophie was 18 years old, a school for mathematicians opened in Paris. Sophie could not take classes there because it was for men only. However, she did not let this discrimination against women stop her. She started writing letters to math professors at the school. She asked them questions and she wrote about her ideas. Yet, she did not sign her own name on the letters. She used a man's name, Monsieur LeBlanc. This idea worked and the professors replied to her letters. After a while, one professor asked to meet the brilliant Monsieur LeBlanc. Imagine his surprise! Monsieur LeBlanc was a woman. The professor did not tell anyone Sophie's secret. Sophie continued to write to other mathematicians and she even met some of them. But they usually stopped helping her after a short time. Was it because she was a woman? No one is sure. It was a challenge to be an educated woman in Sophie's time, but it did not stop her. Sophie went on studying and learned algebra and calculus. Sophie Germain is famous for excellent work on a difficult math problem that was a challenge for many other mathematicians. Sophie is also famous for her studies of metal as a building material. Years later, engineers used her ideas to build skyscrapers, such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Sophie's hometown. Today, on the base of the Eiffel Tower, there are 72 names of brilliant French scientists and mathematicians. These people made significant contributions to the world. However, there is one important name that is missing: Sophie Germain.