Why Did Sophie Germain Discover Germain Primes?

[matqkks]

Why did Germain come up with her Germain primes? I am intrigued to know why Sophie came across these primes. Do they have any applications?

 

[micromass]

According to wikipedia:

Germain proved that the first case of Fermat's Last Theorem, in which the exponent divides one of the bases, is true for every Sophie Germain prime, and she used similar arguments to prove the same for all other primes up to 100. For details see Edwards, Harold M. (2000), Fermat's Last Theorem: A Genetic Introduction to Algebraic Number Theory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Germain_prime