Early women in science

In case you haven’t seen it yet, I wanted to point everyone to this amazing collection of photographs of women scientists working before the 1970s/1980s (when women were more severely underrepresented in the sciences).  This collection was put together by the Smithsonian for International Women’s Day/Women’s History Month.  Looking through the photographs was super informative and inspirational – I had never heard of the vast majority of these women!  It goes to show how the women who were working in science at the time went unrecognized.  And the photographs themselves are truly treasures.  So if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you take a look.  Some amazing women in the collection include Cornelia Maria Clapp, recipient of the first and second biology PhDs awarded to a woman in the U.S., biochemist Gerty Cori, winner of a Nobel Prize in Medicine, and aviator Jaqueline Cochran, the first woman to break the sound barrier!
For some more inspirational women scientists, check out 25 Female Scientists to Celebrate This Month!

In the NY area? Come to Inspiring Women Scientists!

Are you in the New York area? Consider attending the Inspiring Women Scientists forum! There are going to be some really exciting talks and panels about science in academia and career options in science. Registration is free, and it looks to be a really fun, inspirational, and informative day.  I went last year and I highly recommend it.  If you can’t attend, I’ll be blogging about it afterwards!

More information/registration: http://cuny.edu/research/news-events/IWS.html

Show me what a scientist looks like…

…This Is What a Scientist Looks Like!

I recently stumbled across this really awesome blog called “This Is What a Scientist Looks Like“. Essentially, this blog tries to change the stereotypical perceptions of who a scientist is and what they look like.  Some of the pictures posted on the blog show us scientists who are women, and scientists who have families (including several with young children).  But it also shows us scientists doing things that aren’t science.  Scientists are not one-dimensional, and spend plenty of time doing things outside the lab/classroom.  There is a weightlifting entomologist, a soccer-coaching psychologist, a bagpipe playing biologist, a scuba-diving planetary scientist, and a fashion blogger/pharmacologist.

I think that showing that scientists come in many different forms can go a long way in increasing the representation of women in the sciences.  Scientists are not mythical men in lab coats, doing experiments through the night in their basement laboratories.  We do not all wear nerdy glasses and sport pocket protectors.*  Scientists can be your sister, your friend, your neighbor, your mother, and may even be you!

What stereotypes about scientists do you think need to be dispelled?

 

*Despite this, we will probably be nerdy in other ways. And actually myself and most of my friends wear glasses..

Maria Goeppert-Mayer (Happy Ada Lovelace Day!)

Today is Ada Lovelace Day – a day dedicated to discussing influential women of science!  I decided to talk about Maria Goeppert-Mayer, one of two women to win the Nobel Prize in physics (the other was Marie Curie).  You can read more about Ada Lovelace in this past blog post.

Maria Goeppert-Mayer

Maria Mayer was born in 1906, in what was then Germany.  In 1910, the family moved to Göttingen, where her father had a job as a Professor of Pediatrics.  Her father was in the 7th generation of university scholars in his family, and so it was expected that Maria would get an education.  Maria went to public and private schools, taking the entrance exam for the University at Göttingen in 1924.  She originally intended to be a math major, but switched to physics after taking a physics seminar with Max Born.  Other students of Born’s included Fermi, Oppenheimer, and Dirac.  Maria got her PhD in physics in 1930.  For her dissertation, she she calculated the “probability that an electron orbiting an atom’s nucleus would emit two photons of light as it jumped to an orbit closer to the nucleus.” (http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/mayer.html)  Her calculation was experimentally confirmed in the 1960s.

She married Joseph Mayer, a physical chemist, in 1930, and moved with him to Baltimore, where he had a position at Johns Hopkins University.  Because of anti-nepotism laws, Maria couldn’t have a paid position at the university and instead became a “volunteer associate”.  Nevertheless, until the Mayers left Johns Hopkins in 1938, Maria produced 10 papers, a textbook, and had her daughter.

After her husband lost his job at Johns Hopkins, the Mayers went to Columbia University.  She still could not hold a paid position at Columbia, but she still worked in physics, becoming a member of Enrico Fermi’s lab.  When WWII started, she received a part time, paid teaching position at Sarah Lawrence College.  She also started working on a secret project regarding fuel for nuclear fission weapons at Columbia.  She visited the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico several times.

When the war ended, Maria went with her husband to the University of Chicago, where she was a professor (although the work was voluntary, and she was not paid).  Several months later, she got a paid position as a senior research associate at Argonne National Laboratory.  There, she developed the theory that won her the Nobel Prize – that if electrons orbited the nucleus in shells, the number of electrons in the stable atoms represented “full” electron shells.  These full shells were more stable than non-filled shells.

In 1956, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.  In 1959, UC San Diego offered paid positions to both Maria and her husband. They accepted the positions and moved to California.  In 1963, she won the Nobel Prize for her shell model of the nucleus.  She shared the prize with another scientist who developed the shell model around the same time as she did.  She became the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics, and the first to do so for theoretical work.  No Physics Nobel Prizes have been awarded to women since Maria Goeppert-Mayer.  Maria Goeppert-Mayer died in 1972.

Source: 1, 2

Zombie Marie Curie

A friend shared this xkcd comic with me and I had to show you guys:

On one hand, it’s funny, but it also addresses something very important: the lack of visibility of female scientists.  Marie Curie was an amazing scientist, but she’s not the only female scientist out there.  This comic speaks to one of my blog goals, which is to show people some of the great female scientists out there, and talk about the contributions they have made.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Cecilia Payne was born in England in 1900.  While attending Newham College at Cambridge University, Cecilia became interested in astronomy.  She studied physics at Cambridge, but was not awarded a degree, because Cambridge did not offer degrees to women at the time.  She received a fellowship to do research at the Harvard Observatory under the direction of Harlow Shapley, the director of the Harvard Observatory.  She started there in 1923.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

She received her PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College, and became the first person (male or female) to receive a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe.  Her dissertation is extremely highly regarded, and thought by some to be the most brilliant astronomy PhD thesis ever written.  Her dissertation was entitled “Stellar Atmospheres, A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars”, and it argued that the variations observed in the spectral absorption lines of stars are due to temperature, not due to different stellar compositions.  She also (correctly) suggested that stars were composed mainly of hydrogen.  The fact that we can determine the temperature of a star based on it’s spectrum is absolutely integral to astronomy.  However, many doubted Cecilia’s results because they thought that all astronomical bodies had the same relative amounts of elements.  In her thesis, deferring to those more highly regarded, she wrote that her results were almost certainly incorrect.  But within a few years, most astronomers accepted that hydrogen was more abundant in the sun than on earth.

After completing her thesis work, she was hired by Harvard to continue work in the Harvard Observatory.  In 1926, at age 26, she became the youngest person to ever be featured in American Men of Science.  She married Russian astronomer Sergei Gaposchkin in 1934.  Cecilia collaborated with Sergei in studying all variable stars brighter than 10th magnitude.  These results were published in 1938 in Variable Stars, which became a standard reference in the field.  However, Cecilia’s work was unrecognized and unappreciated at Harvard.  She taught courses, but until 1945, none of them were listed in the Harvard course catalog.  When Harlow Shapley was replaced by Donald Menzel as the director of the Harvard Observatory, Cecilia was given a raise, promoted to professor, and named the chair of the astronomy department.  She was the first woman at Harvard to hold a position that was not specifically for a woman.

Until her death in 1979, Cecilia wrote over 150 papers and published four books on stars and stellar evolution.  In 1934, she received the Annie Jump Cannon prize from the American Astronomical Society.  She received honorary doctorates from many colleges, and, in 1976, became the first woman to be granted the American Astronomical Society’s Henry Norris Russell Prize.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin helped pave the way for women who came after her.  Women were rarely involved in the sciences in her time, and especially not women with children.  But Cecilia had three children and continued to do her research.  She once shocked superiors by giving a lecture while she was five months pregnant.  Her legacy lives on through her magnificent contributions to astronomy.

Sources: 1/2/3/4

Betty Jean Jennings, one of the first women in IT industry, passes away

I recently wrote about Betty Jean Jennings in my blog post on the documentary “Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII”.  She was featured prominently in “Top Secret Rosies” for her work computing ballistics trajectories for the army during World War II.  Today I learned that Betty Jean Jennings passed away on March 23, 2011, at the age of 86.

Betty Jean Jennings was born on December 27, 1924 in Missouri.  She attended the Northwest Missouri State Teachers College in the 1940s, and majored in mathematics.  After graduating, she went to work for the U.S. Army, computing ballistics trajectories.   This work eventually led to her being selected as one of six women chosen to program ENIAC, the first electronic computer.  At age 20, she was the youngest woman chosen to participate.  She was one of two women who created the trajectory program for the public demonstration of ENIAC.  After the war was over, she worked on BINAC, another early electronic computer, and UNIVAC, the first commercial computer.  She was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997.

Betty Jean Jennings made extremely valuable contributions to the development of computers and computer programming and her legacy will live on through her pioneering work.  If you’re interested in learning more about her, I strongly suggest you watch “Top Secret Rosies”, which is instant watch on Netflix!

Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace is hailed as the world’s first computer programmer.  She was born in 1815, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron.  Shortly after Ada’s birth, Lord and Lady Byron separated, leaving Lady Byron to raise Ada on her own.  Not wanting Ada to become a poet like her father, Lady Byron made sure Ada was taught mathematics and science.  When she was 17, Ada was introduced to Mary Somerville, who translated Laplace’s works into English.  At one of Mrs. Somerville’s dinner parties, Ada heard about Charles Babbage‘s idea for the analytical engine, a mechanical computer that would be the successor to the difference engine, which was a design for a mechanical calculator.

In 1842, mathematician Louis Menebrea wrote a summary of the analytical engine in an article in French.  Babbage enlisted Ada to translate it into English.  Ada translated it and added a set of notes, which ended up being three times as long as the original article.  Ada Lovelace and Babbage exchanged correspondence about the engine, and Ada predicted it could have many practical and scientific uses, such as composing complex music and creating graphics.  Ada’s notes also included a method of calculating the Bernoulli numbers.  This is considered the first computer program.

Unfortunately, the analytical engine was never built, partially due to a lack of funding.  Ada died in 1852, at the young age of 36, from uterine cancer.

Sources: 1, 2

Mae Jemison

Mae Jemison is an incredible woman and scientist, and is the first African American woman to travel in space.

Mae Jemison was born in 1956 and moved to Chicago early in her childhood.  As a child, she would spend many hours in the library reading about science.  When she was in high school, she decided to pursue a career in biomedical engineering.  After graduating from high school, she attended Stanford University on a National Achievement Scholarship.  Mae graduated from Stanford in 1977 with 2 bachelors degrees – one in chemical engineering and one in African and African-American Studies.  She then went to the Cornell University Medical College, receiving her doctor of medicine degree in 1981.  While she was at Cornell, she traveled to Cuba, Kenya, and to a refugee camp in Thailand to provide people with medical care.  Dr. Jemison became a Peace Corps Medical Officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia, where she also did medical research and taught.  After returning to the U.S., she took a job as a general practitioner.  She also enrolled in graduate courses in engineering and applied to NASA’s astronaut program.  Her first application was turned down, but she did not give up and was one of 15 people accepted from an applicant pool of over 2,000.

After completing astronaut training, Jemison became a science mission specialist.  In 1992, on the 8-day mission STS-47 Spacelab-J, Jemison conducted experiments on motion sickness and weightlessness, as well as an experiment to see how tadpoles would develop in space (they developed fine!).

After leaving NASA, Jemison accepted a teaching fellowship at Dartmouth College and founded The Jemison Group, which is a company that designs and consults on technology.  At Dartmouth, she started the Jemison Institute for Advancing Technology in Developing Countries.  She also started “The Earth We Share” which is an international science camp where students do experiments and learn critical thinking.

In an interview, when asked what tips she could give to young girls about achieving their dreams, Jemison answered:

“First of all, understand that sometimes other people won’t have the same vision of you that you have of yourself. Don’t accept other people’s limitations as being reality. Also, understand that you have as much right as anyone else to be in this world, and to be in any profession you want. That’s the most important thing — you don’t have to wait for permission.”

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4

Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II

“These computers, these ladies that computed these firing tables – it was absolutely vital work. And without their contributions to the war effort, we would have lost World War II. We could not have won World War II without that data.”

-Dr. William F. Atwater, Military Historian

Female Computers of WWII

The documentary “Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II” introduces us to the women computers of WWII – women who were recruited to help calculate ballistics trajectories in order to create trajectory tables that were shipped to troops around the world.  Back then, a computer meant a person who did calculations as a job.  During WWII, with men overseas, women saw expanding opportunities in the workplace.  These female computers were recruited from the mathematics departments of colleges and asked to interview for the Pennsylvania Computing Section, a ballistics lab in the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

These trajectory problems required thousands of calculations and the solving of differential equations.  A 60 second shell trajectory problem took a human around 40 hours to complete.  Six women were assigned to work on a differential analyzer, which completed the same problem in 15 minutes.  These women worked hard, knowing that the soldiers in the field relied upon the manuals they sent out.  They worked double or triple shifts if necessary and took no vacations.  

Later on, some of these women became programmers on ENIAC, the world’s first electronic computer.  When ENIAC was designed, the women were invited to interview to be programmers since they had been involved in the human computing work.  Two of them worked day and night to program the press demonstration of ENIAC, which was held in February 1946.  However, these women did not always receive the recognition they deserved.  Of the demonstration, Dr. Jennifer S. Light says, “Many of the men engineers received publicity, while the female computers and programmers did not.  As far as the official publicity that was staged in February 1946 that was organized by the war department and pretty tightly controlled in terms of what journalists and other people attending saw, Betty Jean Jennings and Betty Snyder developed the demonstration trajectory program.  Again, they were the ones who made the machine do the things that we all got very excited about, but their participation was never mentioned in either war department press releases or later news reports that relied on those publicity materials.”

Female Programmers wit ENIAC

These women made massive contributions to the war effort, but went largely unrecognized.  This documentary pays homage to these great women.  They were eager to help and to put their skills to use in whatever ways they could.

In addition to showing us that these women had serious mathematical chops, we also get the opportunity to see how they worked together, how they felt about their work, and what their lives were like during this time.  These women grew very close while working on this project.  Betty Jean Jennings, one of the ENIAC programmers, said, “Well I’ve always said that I was the luckiest person in the world because of working on the Eniac with these women that I really came to love and admire and respect and I had so much fun with them.”  It is clear that they cherished the opportunity to participate.  But while the women computers knew their work was important, they also understood the gravity of what they were calculating.  One computer, Doris Blumberg Polsky, said “For many, many years, even when my older children were certainly old enough to understand what we did during the war effort, I never discussed it with them.  I never mentioned ballistics, I never mentioned the unit or anything like that, and it kind of came as a surprise to them when we finally opened up and told them what we did during the war.  I didn’t feel – I still don’t feel – that it’s something I can kind of brag about.  This was a tough thing to get your mind set on and accept for yourself.”

Throughout history, women have not always been able to contribute because of a lack of opportunity and gender stereotypes standing in their way.  When World War II provided the opportunity, these women rose to the challenge without hesitation, and poured everything they had into the important project at hand.  “Top Secret Rosies” is a compelling and informative documentary, teaching us about WWII, and those women who contributed behind the scenes in integral ways.  In 1997, the female ENIAC programmers were inducted into the Women in Technology Hall of Fame.

Top Secret Rosies

If you are interested in watching “Top Secret Rosies”, it is available for instant watch on Netflix, or you can attend one of the screenings listed on their website.  For anyone in NYC, there is a screening at Hunter College’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute on March 17th at 6:30pm.