She wanted to read rather than sleep. Her parents would remove all her clothes and douse the fire in her bedroom to force her to sleep. She would sneak out of the bedroom late at night to spend the hours wrapped in a blanket reading by firelight. She became an outstanding mathematician. She developed the modern theory of elasticity.
Elasticity is the mathematical representation of stress and strain in materials such as steel beams.
Modern construction is impossible without her original works on the subject. Her compatriots dubbed her the Hypatia of the 18th century . One of her textbooks contained a sentence describing the stability of orbits, and how perturbations affected them. A man named Adams read her book, believed the math, and went looking for the planet disturbing the orbit of the planet Uranus. He found Neptune.