On International Women’s Day we celebrate the achievements of women around the world. One inspiring story of women in STEM is that of Sophie Germain (1776-1831), a French mathematician and physicist who made groundbreaking strides in elasticity theory and number theory. She learned mathematics from reading books in her father’s library, and while she was not permitted to study at the École Polytechnique, due to prejudice against her gender, she was able to obtain lecture notes and decided to submit work under the name Monsieur LeBlanc. Some prominent mathematicians at the time, including Joseph-Louis Lagrange and Carl Friedrich Gauss, with whom Germain wrote, recognized her intellect and were supportive of her work in mathematics. 

     Sophie Germain is remembered as a brilliant and determined trailblazer in mathematics. She was the first woman to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her contributions in elasticity theory and was among the first to make significant contributions toward proving Fermat’s Last Theorem. Among her many accomplishments, one special case of Fermat’s Last Theorem she was able to prove is when the exponent takes the form of what is now known as a Sophie Germain prime: a prime, p, such that 2p+1 is also a prime. The associated prime, 2p+1, is called a safe prime. 

     To mark International Women’s Day, I’ve created a document exploring the Ulam spiral highlighting Sophie Germain primes and safe primes, as an adaptation of Lazar Paroski’s Ulam spiral document. The image below displays part of the Ulam spiral with Sophie Germain primes highlighted in red, safe primes highlighted in blue, primes that are both a Sophie Germain prime and safe prime highlighted in purple, and primes that are neither in grey. 

  

     The document also contains small explorations of these types of prime numbers. For instance, one interesting property of safe primes is that they must either be 5, 7 or take the form 12k-1 for some k≥1. This can be shown from the fact a safe prime q must equal 2p+1 for some prime, p (a Sophie Germain prime), by definition. Then, since q and p are prime, for q > 7 we can determine through contradiction that q ≡ 3 (mod 4) and q ≡ 5 (mod 6), to conclude q ≡ 11 (mod 12) ≡ -1 (mod 12). And so, q = 12k-1 for some k≥1. The Maple Learn document can be found here along with its Maple script. The document also includes a group where you can test whether some positive integer of your choice, n, is a Sophie Germain prime or a safe prime. Alternatively, given n, a button press will display the next Sophie Germain prime greater than n, using Maple’s NextSafePrime command in the number theory package.  

     In mathematics, there is no shortage of interesting rabbit holes to dive into; many of which are the result of past and present women in mathematics, like Sophie Germain, who have persevered despite their hardships. 

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