AD 415: Hypatia of Alexandria (died in AD 415) - the first notable woman in mathematics. She also taught philosophy and astronomy. Hypatia's contributions to science include the invention of the hydrometer and charting of celestial bodies.
1754: Dorothea Christiana Erxleben (1715-1762) - the first female medical doctor in Germany.
1811: Mary Anning (1799-1847) - known for discovering important fossil finds of the Jurassic era at Lyme Regis. Mary Anning's first discovery was an ichthyosaur in 1811. Her findings had a major impact on the contemporary scientific understanding of prehistoric life and the history of the world.
1816: Sophie Germain (1776-1831) - a mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. Sophie Germain was the first female winner of the grand prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1816 for her work on the elasticity theory.
1842/43: Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852) - the world's first computer programmer. In 1842/43, Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm to be processed by a machine while translating Charles Babbage's work on the analytical engine, an early mechanical computer.
1848: Maria Mitchell (1818-1889) - known for her work in astronomy and calculating the positions of Venus. In 1848, Maria Mitchell was the first woman member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science two years later.
1858: Rosa Smith Eigenmann (1858-1947) - the first woman ichthyologist. Together with her husband, Carl H. Eigenmann, Rosa Smith Eigenmann discovered around 150 species of fish.
1870: Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842-1911) - chemist and ecologist. Ellen Swallow was one of the founders of the environmental hygiene, a precursor of the modern science of ecology. She was the first woman admitted to the MIT in Cambridge in 1870.
1903/1911: Marie Skłodowska Curie (1867-1934) - the first person honored with two Nobel Prizes. In 1903, Marie and Pierre Curie were awarded half the Nobel Prize in Physics for their research on the radiation phenomena. The second Nobel Prize was awarded to Marie Curie in Chemistry for the discovery of the elements radium and polonium and the isolation of radium. She was also the first female professor at the University of Paris.
1912: Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941) - an astronomer who developed the Harvard Classification Scheme, together with Edward Charles Pickering, in 1912. This stellar classification based on the temperatures of the stars is still in use today.
1913: Rahel Hirsch (1870-1953) - the first woman to become a professor in medicine in the Kingdom of Prussia in 1913 and thus she was also the first woman to work at Charité. Rahel Hirsch discovered that solid particles could penetrate from the veins and arteries into the kidneys and get harmlessly expelled through the urine, which was acknowledged only after her death and retroactively named "Hirsch Effect" by Gerhard Volkheimer. In 1919, she had to quit science and work as a medical doctor because she was not paid at the Charité. She finally went to London in 1938 because Jews could no longer work under the Nazi regime.
1914: Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878-1972) - one of the first female engineers holding a PhD and considered to be the mother of modern management. Together with her husband, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr., Lillian laid the groundwork for industrial engineering. In her book "The Psychology of Management", published in 1914, she demanded that psychology should be part of management.
1917: Florence Rena Sabin (1871-1953) - the first woman to become a full professor at a medical college when she got appointed as a professor of histology at Johns-Hopkins School of Medicine in 1917. Florence Sabin was also the first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1924) and the first woman to head a department at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (1925).
1918: Amalie "Emmy" Noether (1882-1935) - considered as the most important woman in the history of mathematics by Albert Einstein and David Hilbert. Emmy Noether considerably contributed to the fields of abstract algebra and theoretical physics. The Noether's theorem published in 1918 proved the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.
1926: May Edward Chinn (1896-1980) - a physician and the first African-American woman to graduate from Bellevue Hospital Medical College and to intern at Harlem Hospital despite discrimination concerning her sex and race. May Edward Chinn is also known for her work in cancer research developing the Pap smear test for cervical cancer.
1928: Margaret Mead (1901-1978) - a cultural anthropologist and one of the most important representatives of cultural relativism in the 20th century. She also paved the way for the sexual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. The first of her 23 books, Coming of Age in Samoa, was published in 1928 indicating her strong belief in cultural determinism.
1934: Dame Jane Morris Goodall (born in 1934) - a primatologist who is considered to be the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees. She studied the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees for 45 years.
1935: Irène Joliot-Curie (1897-1956) - the daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie. In 1935, Irène Joliot-Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie, "for their synthesis of new radioactive elements". The family Curie is the one with the most Nobel laureates to date.
1940: Roger Arliner Young (1899-1964) - the first African American woman to receive a doctorate degree in zoology in 1940. Her contributions to science include the research on radiation effects on sea urchin eggs, the mechanisms of hydration and dehydration of living cells, and the control of salt concentration in paramecium.
1944: Lise Meitner (1878-1968) - the second woman receiving a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna in 1905. Lise Meitner is known for her work on the discovery of nuclear fission for which her colleague Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944. Five years later, she received the Max Planck Medal of the German Physics Society. It was several years later after her death, in 1997, that the element 109 was named meitnerium in her honour.
1944: Helen Brooke Taussig (1898-1986) - the founder of the field of pediatric cardiology. Helen Taussig developed a concept first applied in the Blalock-Taussig shunt in 1944. This procedure extended the lives of children born with a blue baby syndrome (anoxemia).
1947: Gerty Theresa Cori (1896-1957) - the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and the third woman receiving a Nobel Prize in science. In 1947, Gerty Cori was awarded one half of the Nobel Prize together with her husband, Carl Ferdinand Cori, "for their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen". They shared the prize with Bernardo Houssay.
1947: Mária Telkes (1900-1995) - a chemist who created the first thermoelectric power generator in 1947 and the first thermoelectric refrigerator in 1953 using the principles of semiconductor thermoelectricity.
1951: Rózsa Péter (1905-1977) - the first Hungarian female mathematician to become an Academic Doctor of Mathematics and to be elected to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Rózsa Péter is credited for her work on the Recursive Function Theory published in 1951. She also published "Playing with Infinity" in 1957 which was translated into at least 14 languages.
1951/2: Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992) - a pioneering computer scientist who was one of the first programmers of the Havard Mark I computer. Grace Hopper also developed the first compiler for a computer programming language (A-0 System) in 1951/52 as well as COBOL, one of the first programming languages.
1953: Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920-1958) - a pioneering molecular biologist. Rosalind Franklin critically contributed to the hypothesis on the structure of the DNA published in 1953 by Francis Crick and James D. Watson who, together with Wilkins, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. She is also known for her work on the structures of the tobacco mosaic and polio viruses.
1957/58: Brenda Milner (born in 1918) - the first to study the role of the hippocampus in the formation of memory. In 1957/58, Brenda Milner got famous for her work about the patient H.M. who after damage to the medial temporal lobe showed memory deficits.
1962: Rachel Louise Carson (1907-1964) - was a marine biologist and nature writer. Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring" (1962) was the foundation for the US and worldwide environmental movement and is considered to be one of the most influential books of the 20th century.
1963: Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1906-1972) - the second female Nobel laureate in Physics in 1963 after Marie Curie. Maria Goeppert-Mayer was credited, together with Johannes Hans Daniel Jensen and Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure" of the atomic nucleus.
1964: Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994) - a chemist who worked on the development of protein crystallography. Dorothy Hodgkin discovered the three-dimensional structures of cholesterol (1937), penicillin (1945), vitamin B12 (1954), and insulin (1969). In 1964, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances".
1967: Helen Battles Sawyer Hogg (1905-1993) - credited for her outstanding achievements in astronomy. Helen Sawyer Hogg advanced research on globular clusters and therefore, received the Rittenhouse Astronomical Society Silver Medal Award in 1967.
1975: Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) - the first woman elected president of the American Physical Society in 1975. During the second world war, Chien-Shiung Wu worked on the Manhattan Project. In the 1950s, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang showed in their theoretical studies that the "Law of Conservation of Parity" was invalid which Chien-Shiung Wu could confirm in her experiments. For their work, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957.
1977: Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (born in 1921) - the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Rosalyn Yalow developed the radioimmunoassay (RIA) technique of peptide hormones together with her co-worker Berson for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1977. She shared the prize with Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally.
1983: Barbara McClintock (1902-1992) - awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1983 "for her discovery of mobile genetic elements". She is the only woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in this category.
1986: Rita Levi-Montalcini (born in 1909) - the oldest living Nobel laureate and the first to reach a 100th birthday. Rita Levi-Montalcini is a neurologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with her colleague Stanley Cohen, for the discovery of the Nerve Growth Factor (NGF). Read a previous blog entry dedicated to Rita Levi-Montalcini here.
1988: Gertrude Belle Elion (1918-1999) - a biochemist and pharmacologist. Together with George Herbert Hitchings and Sir James Whyte Black, Gertrude Elion received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment" in 1988. She developed the first immuno-suppressive agent used for organ transplants as well as drugs to treat, among others, leukemia, malaria, viral herpes, and meningitis.
1992: Mae Carol Jemison (born in 1956) - the first African American woman to travel in space. Mae Jemison is a physician and NASA astronaut who went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on September 12, 1992.
1995: Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (born in 1942) - a biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Eric Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis, for their work on "the genetic control of embryonic development" in 1995. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard is the director of the Max-Planck Institute for Developmental Biology and the Genetics Department in Tuebingen.
2002: Elizabeth Loftus (born in 1944) - a psychologist known for her research on false memories and the misinformation effect. Elizabeth Loftus was ranked 58th of the 100 most influential psychologists of the 20th century and the highest ranked woman on the list in 2002.
2004: Linda B. Buck (born in 1947) - a biologist credited for her work on the olfactory system. "For their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system", Linda Buck and Richard Axel received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004.
2008: Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (born in 1947) - a virologist known for her work on the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The discovery of this virus resulted in one half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008 which Françoise Barré-Sinoussi received along with Luc Montagnier.
2009: Elizabeth Helen Blackburn (born in 1948) and Carolyn Widney "Carol" Greider (born in 1961) - two biologists who, together with Jack William Szostak, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 "for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase". The enzyme was discovered in 1984 when Carol Greider was still a graduate student of Elizabeth Blackburn.
2009: Ada E. Yonath (born in 1939) - the first Israeli woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize. In 2009, Ada Yonath was credited for her groundbreaking work on the structure and function of the ribosome, together with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Arthur Steitz.
...and the list goes on!
Further Reading: Women in Science - A Selection of 16 Significant Contributors: http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/GWIS.pdf
this article originally appeared in our November 2010 newsletter, Volume 03, Issue 3
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