History Gets in Touch with Its Feminine Side

…and this leads to the impression that women have only done things to help advance women’s rights. Of course, history’s “firsts” are important, but we need to get the full picture.

Ada Lovelace December 10, 1815-November 27, 1852

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Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace was the world’s first programmer. Not the first female- the first. She foresaw the use of calculating machine in the mid-19th century and wrote a series of programs for a machine that had not even been built. She wrote her programs in the course of translating the work of one Charles Babbage into Italian. Babbage had created the ‘analytical engine’, an early computer.

The US Defense Department created a computer language called Ada- which is named after her.

Emilie Du Chatelet  December 17, 1706 – September 10, 1749

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Emilie Du Chatelet was a French physicist whose crowning achievements were the French translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica (with her own commentary) and whose research regarding fire was the precursor to infra-red radiation and our modern understanding of the nature of light.

Sophie Germain April 1, 1776 – June 27, 1831

Sophie Germain oiginated the concept of mean curvature in the field of differential geometry during her research on elasticity theory. She also discovered the Sophie Germain Prime which is a prime number p where 2p+1 is also prime.

One of her proofs restricted the number of possible solutions to Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Rosalind Franklin 25 July 1920 – 16 April 1958

Rosalind Franklin was an X-ray crystallographer whose work was used to develop Watson and Crick’s theory of DNA structure. She died of ovarian cancer at age 37 and so was not named in the Nobel prize that Watson and Crick recieved, since the Nobel Prize does not award posthumously.

She also led pioneering research on polio and the tobacco mosaic virus.

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin 12 May 1910 – 29 July 1994

Dorothy Hodgkin was an x-ray crystallographer who discovered the structures of cholesterol, penicillin, insulin, vitamin B-12, lactoglobulin, ferritin and tobacco mosaic virus, among others. She won the Nobel Prize for her vitamin B-12 research.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt July 4, 1868 – December 12, 1921

Leavitt was an Americanscientists who discovered period-luminosity relationship while working as a 10.50/week assistant at the Harvard College Observatory. She was what was called a “computer”. Her discovery set the course for modern astronomy and without it, Edwin Hubble would never have made his discovery.

Yet she never recieved any recognition in her lifetime.

There was one incident where a Swedish mathematician considered nominating her for the 1926 Nobel Prize. He wrote to the director of the observatory asking for more information. He didn’t know that she had died four years earlier of cancer. The head of the observatory, one Harlow Shapley wrote back saying that he deserved credit for Leavitt’s 1893 discovery, because he had interpreted it.

Other Works:

• History Comes Out of the Closet
• History Goes Green
• History Gets Scandalous