Women in Science

Not too long ago, I came across this series of wonderful posters commemorating women in science, available on the website insidetheperimeter.ca, which presents "big ideas from the Perimeter Institute [for Theoretical Physics]". What amazed me is that, in spite of my obvious interest in women in science and engineering documented in my own path, I had never heard of many of the women profiled. Wouldn't talking about the stories and the people behind the discoveries help make science education more interesting for more middle school and high school kids? 

Thankfully, the informative webpage on insidetheperimeter.ca has some details on who these women are and why they deserve to be remembered. The webpage also has the colorful individual posters, which makes it a lot more enjoyable to read than this post, but I will still say a few words on each.

• Claudia Alexander (1959-2015), PhD U.Michigan, geophysicist, worked for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory including as last project manager of Galileo mission to Jupiter 
• Vera Rubin (1928-2016), PhD Cornell, astronomer who did pioneering work on galaxy rotation rates
• Vivienne Malone-Mayes (1932-1995), PhD UT, active in civil rights demonstrations, fifth African-American math PhD in the U.S., first African-American on faculty at Baylor, 
• Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), mathematician, worked on the early "computer", 
• Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997), PhD UC Berkeley, "experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the field of nuclear physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion" (according to her Wikipedia page)
• Emmy Noether (1882-1935), PhD U.Erlangen, described by Albert Einstein and others as "the most important woman in mathematics" (according to her Wikipedia page) developing the theory of rings, fields and algebras. Was removed from her teaching position by the Nazis, took refuge in the USA where she started teaching first at Bryn Mawr and then at Princeton.
• Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941), "American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification" (again according to her Wikipedia page).
• and of course two-time Nobel-Prize-winner Marie Sklodowska Curie (1867-1934), who needs no introduction.  

You can read about the Emmy Noether Initiatives at the Perimeter Institute here.