Nicole-Reine Lepaute was born on 5 January 1723 in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris as the daughter of Jean Étable, valet in the service of Louise Élisabeth d'Orléans.

[1] Her father had worked for the royal family for a long time, both in the service of the duchess de Berry and her sister Louise.

For instance, her husband had made a horizontal clock for the palace of Luxembourg and was granted permission to live there for the remainder of their life before he left for Russia.

He believed that women were capable of pursuing ambitious scientific work and that their intellectual pursuits were not a threat to the social order.

He also emphasized the importance of women's roles as wives and mothers, and saw their scientific work as being compatible with their familial duties.

[3] In June 1757, she worked together with Jérôme Lalande and Alexis Clairaut to calculate the date of the next passage of Halley's comet, last seen in 1682.

[6] The team worked for more than six months straight, barely stopping for food, in order to produce a date before the comet arrived.

[4][1][6] Although this was a tenfold improvement over Halley's initial 2 years period,[6] there was still an error of a few days, which caused the astronomer Jean d'Alembert to ridicule their work and call it "more laborious than deep".

[2][4][5][6] The solar eclipse that occurred on 1 April 1764 was a significant event that garnered a great deal of public interest across Europe.

Astronomers saw it as an opportunity to test the accuracy of their calculations of the motion of the Moon, which is an important factor in predicting solar and lunar eclipses.

[7] While Lalande would eventually become a professor of astronomy and the director of the Paris Observatory, she kept working for him for fifteen years as a human computer.

[4] He travelled south to the Terra Australis in 1773, became a professor of mathematics at Paris' Military School and became inducted in the French Royal Academy of Sciences in 1785.

[5][12] Nicole Lepaute spent the last seven years[4][5] of her life taking care of her terminally ill husband until she died in Paris, in the parish of Saint-Roch, on 6 December 1788.