Famous Scientists

The Curies in love, by Kate Beaton
(also see the T-shirt)

So at this point, I think it should be transparently obvious to any educated person that women and men have an equal capacity for competence (and greatness) in any field. But sadly, some people are quite dense, and prejudice and sexual favoritism still linger in public consciousness. This disparity is especially noticeable in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), where men still outnumber women 3 to 1 (up from 13-to-1 in 1975, but still).

Today, I'd just like to take a moment to highlight some of the achievements of women in technology that I personally admire. There are many, many other examples, but these are some of my favorites.

First, from the field of linguistics, one of my favorite linguists is Victoria Fromkin, whose work on speech errors is both brilliant and delightfully interesting. Another of my favorite linguists is Deborah Tannen, whose research in discourse analysis has focused primarily on communication styles. She's published several pop linguistics books, and her writing is quite accessible.

In computer science, of course, there are two notable and highly respected figures who I would be remiss to omit. Ada Lovelace is often considered the first computer programmer. It's actually in honor of Ada Day (March 24) that I'm writing this post. Admiral Hopper is often credited, among numerous achievements of a singular life, with the invention of the compiler. Reading about her reminds me quite a bit of the head of my CS department in college, whom I always associate with the word "rigorous".

Photo 51

Now, the field of x-ray crystallography is not one of my specialties. Heck, I'd never heard of the field before today. But it is interesting in this context because several of the famous crystallographers are ladies. The most controversial is probably Rosalind Franklin, by all accounts an exceptionally skilled crystallography photographer, who produced the infamous Photo 51 (pictured at right). This photograph was apparently the inspiration for Watson and Crick's famous description of the molecular structure of DNA. Another famous crystallographer is Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, one of the founders of the field of protein crystallography (describing penicillin, B-12, and insulin), who also managed to find time to work with numerous organizations for world peace.

There are also several renaissance women I'd like to bring to your attention. As with their male overachiever counterparts, a glance at the lives of these people could make you wonder what the hell you've been doing with your life. Lillian Moller Gilbreth was an industrial management psychology professor/consultant, civil engineer, and advisor to four U.S. presidents. Oh, and mother of TWELVE. Sophia Brahe was a Dutch horticulturalist, chemist, healer, astronomer, and historian, overshadowed a bit by her brother. Beatrix Potter, whose book "Peter Rabbit" you might be familiar with, was a brilliant but frustrated mycologist, and left 4,000 acres to the National Trust in her will. The Linnean Society apologized a hundred years later for snubbing her groundbreaking work because of her gender. And finally, going way back in time, we have the Alexandrian Hypatia, a celibate mathematician, philosopher, physicist, and astronomer, who was brutally murdered and flayed by a Christian mob. I think I'll end with my favorite quote attributed to Hypatia, which does not say what I thought it said at first:

All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.