Ladies Who Blinded Us With Science

For of you who don’t know, today is Pi Day – the holiday celebrating the mathematical constant π (fun fact: it’s also the birthday of Albert Einstein!).

Pi Day is celebrated a number of ways across the United States: discussions on the relevance of π, festivities honoring Einstein, and my personal favorite, excessive consumption of pie. But since I can’t give you all pie through the computer (though I wish I could – get on that technology, scientists!), in honor of Pi Day I present to you a list of truly incredible women in mathematics, science, and engineering. Enjoy!

Aglaonike of Thessaly (2^nd Century BCE)

Also known as “Aganice of Thessaly,” she’s regarded as the first female astronomer of ancient Greece. Her skill and knowledge of the skies allowed her to predict lunar eclipses with stunning accuracy–some believed she was a sorceress because of her abilities.
(Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Hypatia (4^th Century)

Hypatia’s resume was pretty stellar; living in Roman Egypt, she was a skilled mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, the head of the Platonist school in Alexandria, and the last librarian of the Library of Alexandria. She provided notes and commentaries on such works as Diophantus’s Arithmetica (the text that lead to the quadratic equation), and wrote her own book on astronomy called The Astronomical Canon. Her life tragically ended when she was brutally murdered by a Christian mob, and today she’s regarded as a universal genius. 
(Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718 – 1799)

Much like Hypatia, Maria Gaetana Agnesi was a polymath in her abilities: she was a noted linguist, mathematician, and philosopher. A child prodigy, she became fluent in many languages at a young age. She penned the Analytical Institutions for the Use of Italian Youth, a comprehensive treatment of algebra, and covered the relatively new areas of integral and differential calculus. Pope Benedict XIV was impressed, and appointed her a professor of mathematics in 1750 at the University of Bologna.
(Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Ada Lovelace (1815 -1852)

Not only was Ada Lovelace the only legitimate daughter of poet (and playboy extraordinaire) Lord Byron, but she was also a mathematical genius. As a young woman, she took interest in Charles Babbage’s early work on the analytical engine (a mechanical general-purpose computer – Babbage couldn’t complete his work due to lack of funding). In 1842, she translated Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea’s description of the engine to English, adding her own extensive and in-depth annotations. Her notes – which were longer than the original article itself – included an algorithm for processing by machine, aka the world’s first computer program. Babbage himself described her as the “Enchantress of Numbers,” and history remembers her as the “World’s First Computer Programmer.”
(Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Beatrix Potter (1866 – 1943)

Beatrix Potter is perhaps most remembered for her work in children’s literature – The Tale of Peter Rabbit, for example. But she was also fascinated by the natural sciences, and pursued the study of mushrooms – mycology – with great interest. A talented artist, she produced many beautiful and scientifically accurate illustrations and watercolors of her specimens. Encouraged by noted naturalist Charles McIntosh, she delved deeper into her study of mycology and in 1895 developed a theory of germination of microscopic fungi spores. She presented her research and findings in a paper titles “On the Germination of the Spores of the Agaricineae” to the Linnean Society of London, the premier society for the study of taxonomy. She eventually withdrew her paper, realizing her samples were contaminated, but that did not stop her from continuing her studies. 
(Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Marie Skłodowska-Curie (1867 – 1934)

Lise Meitner (1878 – 1968)

If I’m going to wax lyrical about Mme. Curie’s two Nobel Prizes, I have to mention perhaps one of the greatest Nobel snubs in scientific history: the story of Lise Meitner. Born into an Austrian Jewish family, she became the second woman to earn a doctoral degree in physics from the University of Vienna. She studied under Nobel laureate and quantum theory founder Max Planck in Berlin, and met chemist Otto Hahn, with whom she conducted future research and discovered several new isotopes. While she was protected by her Austrian citizenship when Adolf Hitler rose to power, she was still in danger, and eventually fled to Stockholm. She maintained contact with Hahn and in 1913 secretly met with him in Copenhagen to plan a round of experiments. With Meitner’s guidance, Hahn and partner Fritz Strassmann were able to discover nuclear fission – a scientific breakthrough that earned Hahn the Nobel Prize in chemistry. She also never lost her humanity and moral center: she was invited to Los Alamos to work on the Manhattan Project, but emphatically refused, declaring, “I will have nothing to do with a bomb!”
(Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (1906 – 1992)

A professor of mathematics at Vassar and New York University, Grace Hopper brought her skill with numbers to national service entered the U.S. Naval Service (the WAVES – Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) in 1943. She served as one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer, and worked on the two successive models (fun factoid: while working on the Mark II, she discovered a moth stuck in a relay that was slowing down operation. The term “computer bug” can’t be definitely attributed to her, but she certainly popularized the term). She, along with some colleagues, developed the oldest programming language, Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL); which was the language of 80% of the world’s businesses in 1997. One of her most notable contributions to the field of computing was the invention of the first compiler in 1952, the intermediate program that translates English language instructions into the language of the target computer.

(Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Chien-Shung Wu (1912 – 1997)

Nicknamed the “First Lady of Physics” and “the Chinese Marie Curie,” Chien-Shiung Wu was nothing short of an expert in the field of experimental physics. She was instrumental in the Manhattan Project, developing the process of gaseous diffusion, by which uranium metal was separated into isotopes. Her 1956 experiment disproved the Law of Conservation of Parity, a concept that had been accepted as true for the previous 30 years. (It basically implies that nature is symmetrical.) As a Chinese-American woman, she made many breakthroughs: she was the first woman with an honorary doctorate from Princeton, the first Chinese-American to be elected to the U.S. Academy of Sciences, and first female president of the American Physical Society.
(Photo via Science Photo Library)

Ada Yonath (1939) 

In more recent scientific news, Israeli crystallographer Ada Yonath was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2009 for her studies of ribosomes, becoming the first woman to win the prize in chemistry in 45 years. She has remarked that being a female Nobel laureate in the sciences is really no big deal, but I have to disagree!
(Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Do any of you have favorite women in the sciences or math? Going to celebrate Pi Day with an extra slice of pie? Sound off, BUSTies!