Great female scientists!

Name them all! This is for something I'm doing, but I'm hoping ILX benefits from its discussion too.

rosalind franklin

marie curie

sally ride

yep and yep. some unsung heroes amid the known constants would be nice too :)

that was an xpost, will have to look up sally ride!

Nalini Nadkarni

grace hopper

judith resnik

ooh, keep 'em coming!

for those keeping score and in a position of similar unknowingness, wikipedia reveals that:

sally ride = first woman in space
nalini nadkarni = key rainforest ecologist
grace hopper = computing pioneer
judith resnik = second woman/first american jew in space, also first woman to die during space mission (i think)

sally ride's the first american woman in space, first woman in space was some communist trollop

Dian Fossey

we must find out who this mysterious cosmonaut is then

Ada Lovelace
Maria Mitchell
Caroline Herschel
Emmy Noether
Ida Noddack
Lise Meitner
Stephanie Kwolek

are just a few!

(could each suggestion please from now on be followed with a very brief description of their achievement/field? altho iirc dian fossey is the lady who lived with gorillas?)

Barbara McClintock! (Nobel Prize, 1983, research on corn genetics)

Cosmonaut = Valentina Tereshkova?

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

Whoa I just looked up Margie Profet & apparently she's been missing since 2005! (She is most famous for this hypothesis.)

(most famous for that in my mind if nowhere else)

Yes, Dian Fossey was instrumental in studying mountain gorillas, and helping to save them from imminent extinction, although they're highly endangered still. She was murdered at a camp in Rwanda, likely by poachers or others with a financial interest in killing gorillas.

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

Judith Rich Harris, psychologist. I'm a big fan.

lj, run out and try and find a copy of today's indie, it has '100 women who changed the world' incl. big names and unknowns. i can type out the names if you really want i guess but f the blurbs.

it's international women's day tomorrow and i am running a piece for our class website on this topic so i'm obviously gonna have a bit of competition; am entirely uninterested on what the independent has to offer; am entirely interested in what you, ILX, has to say

altho if you could tell me what scientists they've picked that'd be nice ;)

Ada Lovelace -- worked with Charles Babbage and probably invented computer programming
Maria Mitchell -- discovered a comet and was a known abolitionist and suffragist
Caroline Herschel -- first female astronomer awarded the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal (for comets)
Emmy Noether -- "the most important woman in the history of mathematics"
Ida Noddack -- first postulated the concept of nuclear fission, was generally ignored
Lise Meitner -- part of the team that discovered nuclear fission, was denied recognition
Stephanie Kwolek -- invented Kevlar

ty!

Mary Leakey - found australopithecus bones!

Anthropology has a lot of women in the majors, which is cool.

oh and of course Mary Leakey - co-discoverer of Homo habilis.
and many might be wary of calling Margaret Mead a scientist but she was totally awesome!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mileva_Mari%C4%87

^^^ controversial

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

^^^ did my phd ~30 years before me, one of the nicest people i have ever met

ooh she supports a dark-matter-denying theory! she's in

(dark matter is p-lame)

Damn, I want her shirt.

this is because of that cunting article from last week isn't it? i did kinda think of giving up reading it but <3 a paper that goes all FEMINISM ISSUE

Names not already on thread stolen from paper:
Daphne Jackson: Physicist (1st physics prof. etc.)
Dorothy Hodgkin: Chemist (!)
Janet Lane-Claypon: Epidemiologist (early pioneer in a bunch of things, incl. first study of 500 women w/ breast cancer)
Averil Mansfield: Vascular Surgeon (Pioneered stoke-preventing arterial surgery.)
Miriam Rothschild: 'Scientist' did a bunch of things mostly w/ animals
Helen Sharman: 'Engineer and chemist' (bunch of things also first brit to go into space)

xxp, i think she's kind of joking in that quotation. but she is an empiricist, ya.

HYPATIA

sam, what names ARE in this thread? i want to know how much i seem to be ripping 'em off!

http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/1014/2005aloneinthedark004.jpg

Photo above is in UBC museum of anthropology, no? I'd know that crouching animal anywhere.

Anyway, here are some contemporary mathematicians

Ingrid Daubechies (pioneer of wavelet analysis)
Marina Ratner (proved Ratner's theorem, huge advance in ergodic theory)
Claire Voisin (major work in algebraic geometry, esp. related to Hodge theory)

lj you are dead to me until you embrace dark matter as one of poetry's greatest triumphs of the 20th century

get your priorities straight man

you mean this?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51TNvMWil1L._SL500_AA300_.jpg

because that looks rad

The only contemporary mathematician I know as a civilian, male or female, is Danica McKellar.

While the aerospace industry has plenty of female engineers and scientists today, in the 1960s it was a boy's club. There was one woman, however, in the upper ranks at North American... Her name was Rose Lunn and she was a mathematician and an expert in the arcane field of aircraft flutter dynamics. I understand that when she talked, the boys listened.

Mike Gray, Angle of Attack

:D where d'ya get that quote from?

Karen_Uhlenbeck
Joan Birman
Janna Levin

:D where d'ya get that quote from?

Raht cheer

Éva Tardos

that is an awesome quote; can I use it?

Olga Oleinik
Olga Ladyzhenskaya

that is an awesome quote; can I use it?

Heck, it's not mine. I quoted it out of that book and so can you.

I don't think Ada Lovelace was really a scientist, more like the first computer-industry journalist

Mary Ellen Rudin

oh i didn't know about her, we used walter rudin's real analysis book

Alexandra Bellow, additionally immortalized in literature by her ex-husband

oh i didn't know about her, we used walter rudin's real analysis book

And they live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house. How cool is that?

mathematicians lead great lives obviously

you've all been AWESOME fwiw

mathematicians lead great lives obviously

So they do.

Anyway, one more citation before closing time:

Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat

damn, just reading about the Unabomber has kinda blown my mind - weird and compelling story

^^ in which LJ's britishness becomes apparent

rum old fellow, that chap

Jesus Christ

biochemist Gerty Cori

mathematician maria agnesi ("wrote the first book discussing both differential and integral calculus")

Reckon Lady Mary Wortley Montagu deserves at least a mention for her introduction to Britain of an early form of vaccination

When Lady Mary was in the Ottoman Empire, she discovered the local practice of inoculation against smallpox – variolation. Unlike Jenner's later vaccination, which used cowpox, variolation used a small measure of smallpox itself. Lady Mary's own brother had died of the disease, and her own famous beauty had been marred by a bout with the disease, prior to her visit to Turkey. She was eager to spare her children similar suffering, and had them inoculated while in Turkey. On her return to London, she enthusiastically promoted the procedure, but encountered a great deal of resistance from the medical establishment both because it was an "Oriental" process and because of her gender. However, the British royal family had their own children inoculated.

xxxxxxxpost to lj- ummm, the first two def. i don't think there are any more.

Henrietta Leavitt:

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

Did the work on Cepheid Variables that led to the first accurate estimate of the actual size of the universe.

Maria Goeppert-Mayer - the only woman aside from Curie who I remember seeing in my textbooks...

Susan Greenfield

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsie_MacGill - aeronautical engineer. designed airplanes.

i don't think there are any more.

Never underestimate the human spirit!

Just want to reiterate Lise Meitner, who is an all-time fave of mine.

margaret meade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mead

wow spelling

Don't let me spoil your fun but ahem, *HINT HINT*

Dr Gillian McKeith!

Jocelyn Bell is my favourite, as she discovered Pulsars.

oh wait, he is a man. Now I hate him.

oh no, she is a woman after all.

Gillian McKeith disqualified for not being a scientist. Nor a doctor.

That's a pulsar-like rotation.

Fred Hoyle denounced the Nobel committee for not giving Jocelyn Bell part of the Nobel. That's likely why he didn't get one. They give it to his collaborator who did less work.

Charlotte Scott, the first British woman to receive a doctorate in mathematician, and a terrific, clear writer. iirc she scored well enough on the tripos at Cambridge to be a wrangler but wasn't allowed to be one b/c of her gender. But Cayley agreed to take her as a student for the doctorate and naturally she did very well.

Ruth Moufang, who showed that the little Desargues theorem does not imply Desargues' theorem. She was the first woman in Germany to reach the rank of professor (I'm not clear on whether this just means professor, or professor of mathematics; but in any case, a big deal).

My thesis advisor was a woman mathematician also and she is great but I don't want to get too personal here.

Thread has continued to be awesome past the cut-off for my article, but here it is: http://www.elements-science.co.uk/2010/03/08/women-in-science-%E2%80%93-a-celebration/

Credit to y'all

http://www.elements-science.co.uk/wp-content/themes/technical-speech/images/authors/21.jpg

handsome fella in't he canks

Bitchin' thread.

Hedy Lamarr: co-invented technology behind mobile phones, etc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr#Frequency-hopping_spread-spectrum_invention

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Hedy_Lamarr_in_The_Conspirators.jpg

margie profet, who has been missing since 2005, has just been found:

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/05/missing-biologist-surfaces-reunites-with-family.html

great profile of her and her ideas from psychology today: http://www.psychologytoday.com/print/94052