From the first woman to win a Nobel Prize to the discoverer of jumping genes, here are some of the women who have made major contributions to science and mathematics
From the beginning, women have made significant contributions to the fields of mathematics and science. But despite the fact that these pioneering women have changed the way we live in and think about the world, you might not be familiar with their names and faces. From the first woman to earn a Nobel Prize to a legendary primatologist, here are 25 amazing women who changed math and science forever.
Prior to Merian's investigations of insect life and her discovery that insects hatched from eggs, it was widely thought that the creatures generated spontaneously from mud. She became the first scientist to observe and document not only insect life cycles but also how the creatures interacted with their habitats, The New York Times reported in 2017.
Mae Jemison In 1992, when the space shuttle Endeavour blasted off, NASA astronaut Mae Jemison became the first African American woman to reach space. But astronaut is just one of her many titles. Jemison is also a physician, a Peace Corps volunteer, a teacher, and a founder and president of two technology companies, according to Space.com , a Live Science sister site.
Maria Goeppert Mayer In 1963, theoretical physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer became the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, 60 years after Marie Curie won the award. Rita Levi-Montalcini Rita Levi-Montalcini's father discouraged her from pursuing a higher education, because he held Victorian notions and thought that women should embrace the full-time job of being a wife and mother. But Levi-Montalcini pushed back, and eventually, her work on nerve growth factor would earn her the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.
Her work helped explain the nature of geodesics, straight lines across curved surfaces. It had practical applications for understanding the behavior of earthquakes and turned up answers to long-standing mysteries in the field. Noether, a Jewish woman, did her most important work as a researcher at the University of Göttingen in Germany between the late 1910s and early 1930s.
Susan Solomon Susan Solomon is an atmospheric chemist, author and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who for decades worked at NOAA. During her time at NOAA, she was the first to propose, with input from her colleagues, that chlorofluorocarbons were responsible for the Antarctic hole in the ozone layer.
Apgar received her medical degree in 1933 and planned to become a surgeon. But there were limited career opportunities for women in surgery at the time, so she switched to the emerging field of anesthesiology. She would go on to become a leader in the field and the first woman to be named a full professor at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, according to the National Institutes of Health .
Her work continues to this day. At age 104, Milner is still a professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University in Montreal, according to the Montreal Gazette . Jane Goodall Jane Goodall is a legendary primatologist whose work with wild chimpanzees changed the way we see these animals and their relationship with humans.
Lovelace grew up fascinated by math and machinery. At age 17, she met English mathematician Charles Babbage at an event where he was demonstrating a prototype for a precursor to his"analytical engine," the world's first computer. Fascinated, Lovelace decided to learn everything she could about the machine.
She became very interested in crystals and chemistry at age 10, and as an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, she became one of the first to study the structure of organic compounds using a method called X-ray crystallography. In her graduate studies at the University of Cambridge, she extended the work of British physicist John Desmond Bernal on biological molecules and helped to make the first X-ray diffraction study of the stomach enzyme pepsin, according to Britannica .
William Herschel was a musician and astronomer, and he tutored his sister in both vocations. Eventually, Caroline Herschel graduated from grinding and polishing her brother's telescope mirrors to honing his equations and making celestial discoveries all her own. While assisting her brother in his role as court astronomer to King George III in 1783, Caroline Herschel detected three previously undiscovered nebulas; three years later, she became the first woman to discover a comet.
So Germain studied behind her parents' back at first and used a male student's name to submit her work to the math instructors she admired. The instructors were impressed, even when they found out that Germain was a woman, and they took her under their wing as much as they could at the time, according to Louis L. Bucciarelli and Nancy Dworsky's book"Sophie Germain: An Essay in the History of the Theory of Elasticity " .
Bath was inspired at a young age to pursue a career in medicine after learning of Dr. Albert Schweitzer's service to the people of what is now Gabon, in Africa, in the early 1900s, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine . Rachel Carson Rachel Carson was an American biologist, conservationist and science writer. She is best known for her book"Silent Spring" , which describes the harmful effects of pesticides on the environment. The book eventually led to the nationwide ban of DDT and other harmful pesticides, according to the National Women's History Museum .
Ingrid Daubechies The honors and scientific citations Ingrid Daubechies would make a CVS receipt look small: Daubechies, born in 1954 in Brussels, where she earned both her bachelor's and doctorate degrees in physics, was drawn to math from an early age. In addition to having an interest in how things worked, she also loved figuring out"why certain mathematical things were true , they quickly fade, with the wave heights starting at zero, rising and then quickly dropping back to zero.
But Curie is also known for a string of other achievements, according to the Nobel Prize website and Britannica . In 1903, for example, Curie became the first woman in France to earn a doctorate in physics. She was the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris and teach classes at the Sorbonne. She pioneered the use of radium in treating cancer tumors. In 1911, she received a second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry, in recognition of her work in radioactivity.
But McClintock almost missed out on pursuing a career as a scientist. Although she wanted to attend Cornell University, her mother was reluctant to send her there, fearing that the move would ruin her marriage prospects, according to the Nobel Prize website . McClintock's father, a physician, came to her rescue and allowed her to attend.
Wu was born in Liuhe, China, to parents who encouraged her scientific aspirations, according to the National Park Service . She excelled in math and science and attended National Central University, earning a degree in physics. She continued her studies at the University of California, Berkeley, finishing her doctorate in 1940.
Mouton was born in 1929 in Fairfax, Virginia. She was a budding mathematical prodigy at school and went on to earn both a bachelor's and a master's degree in math from Howard University. She worked for the Army Map Service and the Census Bureau before moving to NASA in 1959. There, she first became head mathematician at the Goddard Space Flight Center and oversaw the team tracking satellites in orbit.
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