By popular request, some female mathematicians, scientists and engineers.
Let's start with my favourite - Hypatia. Perhaps the first female mathematician about whom we know a great deal. She taught philosophy and astronomy at the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria at the end of the 4th century AD. agnesscott.edu tells us that "she edited the work On the Conics of Apollonius, which divided cones into different parts by a plane. This concept developed the ideas of hyperbolas, parabolas, and ellipses." I guess to us that sounds esoteric but to mathematicians it's probably fundamental.
Why is she my favourite? OK, you've guessed it - she's the earliest Great Scientist available in the popular Civilization VI computer game, and it's always a race to be the first to recruit her. I know, that's sad. And so was the end of her life - murdered by religious zealots. Maybe this quote of hers didn't endear her to them:
All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.
Moving on in time, eight centuries to be exact, we come to Hildegard of Bingen. She was a German Benedictine abbess who has claims to be a polymath, excelling as a botanist, theologian and philosopher as well as a poet and composer. Check out this utterly beautiful piece:
From the 17th century we have Martine Bertereau, who was a mining engineer and mineralogist. Mr Wiki tells us she "surveyed the sites of hundreds of potential mines in France in the service of the French King Henry IV. Her writings describe the use of divining-rods as well as much useful scientific and practical advice which she derived largely from the Roman engineer Vitruvius's book on architecture, De architectura." She and her husband Jean, also a mineralogist, suffered abuse from many who regarded their work as witchcraft and sorcery, and she eventually died in prison.
Proceeding to the early 20th century, Marie Curie has to be included, of course. She was a chemist and physicist who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. She researched radioactivity and discovered two new elements, Polonium (named after her country of birth) and Radium. She set up institutes as centres of medical research, particularly into radiography. Sadly her death was from exposure to radiation.
We need to finish up in the present day with Yi So-yeon. Born in South Korea in 1978, she gained a doctorate in biotechnology before, in 2008, becoming the first Korean to fly in space. One to watch!
A most excellent blog! And including one of the loveliest pieces of music ever written.
ReplyDeletehttps://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/diversity-in-science/influential-british-women-science/
And from this list I’d also like to flag a woman of very humble background, who as a woman and a dissenter had double barriers to overcome.
There will be a statue of her soon just along the coast from you. Not on a plinth but on the shore conducting her researches.