#1451
Caroline Herschel
1750 - 1848 (98 years)
Caroline Lucretia Herschel was a German-born British astronomer, whose most significant contributions to astronomy were the discoveries of several comets, including the periodic comet 35P/Herschel–Rigollet, which bears her name. She was the younger sister of astronomer William Herschel, with whom she worked throughout her career.
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Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
1900 - 1979 (79 years)
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist who proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth. Independent observations eventually proved she was correct. Her work on the nature of variable stars was foundational to modern astrophysics.
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Marietta Blau
1894 - 1970 (76 years)
Marietta Blau was an Austrian physicist credited with developing photographic nuclear emulsions that were usefully able to image and accurately measure high-energy nuclear particles and events, significantly advancing the field of particle physics in her time. For this, she was awarded the Lieben Prize by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. As a Jew, she was forced to flee Austria when Nazi Germany annexed it in 1938, eventually making her way to the United States. She was nominated for Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry for her work, but did not win. After her return to Austria, she wo...
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Berta Karlik
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Berta Karlik was an Austrian physicist. She worked for the University of Vienna, eventually becoming the first female professor at the institution. While working with Ernst Foyn she published a paper on the radioactivity of seawater. She discovered that the chemical element 85 astatine is a product of the natural decay processes. The element was first synthesized in 1940 by Dale R. Corson, K. R. MacKenzie, and Emilio Segrè, after several scientists in vain searched for it in radioactive minerals.
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Ștefania Mărăcineanu
1882 - 1944 (62 years)
Ștefania Mărăcineanu was a Romanian physicist. She worked with Marie Curie studying the element named for Curie's homeland Polonium. She made proposals that would lead to Irène Joliot-Curie's Nobel Prize. Mărăcineanu believed that Joliot-Curie had taken her work on Induced radioactivity to gain the prize.
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Elda Emma Anderson
1899 - 1961 (62 years)
Elda Emma Anderson was an American physicist and health researcher. During World War II, she worked on the Manhattan Project at Princeton University and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she prepared the first sample of pure uranium-235 at the laboratory. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, she became professor of physics at Milwaukee-Downer College in 1929. After the war, she became interested in health physics. She worked in the Health Physics Division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and established the professional certification agency known as the American Board of H...
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Katherine Clerk Maxwell
1824 - 1886 (62 years)
Katherine Mary Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish physical scientist best known for her observations which supported and contributed to the discoveries of her husband, James Clerk Maxwell. Most notable of these are her involvement with his colour vision and viscosity of gases experiments. She was born Katherine Dewar in 1824 in Glasgow and married Clerk Maxwell in 1858.
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Eva Ahnert-Rohlfs
1912 - 1954 (42 years)
Eva Ahnert-Rohlfs was a German astronomer. She made key observations of variable stars. Eva Ahnert-Rohlfs was born in Coburg . She studied in Würzburg, Munich and Kiel from 1931 to 1933. After nine years of withdrawal into family life, she studied from 1942 until the end of the Second World War at the University of Göttingen. From 1945, she worked closely with professor Cuno Hoffmeister as an assistant astronomer at the Sonneberg Observatory. In 1951, she received a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Jena. At Sonneberg Observatory Eva Rohlfs met the astronomer Paul Oswald Ahnert...
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Emma Vyssotsky
1894 - 1975 (81 years)
Emma Vyssotsky was an American astronomer who was honored with the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy in 1946. Biography Emma earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics at Swarthmore College in 1916 and worked at Smith College as an astronomy/mathematics demonstrator for a year before finding work at an insurance company as an actuary. In 1927, after receiving a Whitney Fellowship and a Bartol Scholarship, she enrolled in astronomy at Radcliffe College . There, she worked with Cecilia Payne on the "spectral line contours of hydrogen and ionized calcium throughout the spectral sequence."
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Lucy Wilson
1888 - 1980 (92 years)
Lucy Wilson was an American physicist, known for her research on theories of vision, optics and X-ray spectroscopy. She was also the first dean of students at Wellesley College. Biography She was born October 19, 1888, in Bloomington, Illinois, the daughter of Lucy Barron White and John James Speed Wilson Jr. Her father worked for American Telephone and Telegraph in Chicago as did his father and her younger brother. Her younger brother had begun to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology two years after Lucy Wilson had entered Wellesley. Wilson not only studied the sciences but also had an interest in languages, especially German, which she studied in high school.
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Valeriya Golubtsova
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Valeriya Alexeyevna Golubtsova was a scientist who was the director of the Moscow Power Engineering Institute from 1943 to 1952. She was the wife of Georgy Malenkov. Biography Golubtsova was born in Nizhny Novgorod in the family of a teacher in the cadet corps, State Councilor Alexei Golubtsov , and Olga Nevzorova, who was a member of an old noble family. Nevzorova's older sisters were the famous "Nevzorov sisters" — Vladimir Lenin's comrades-in-arms in Marxist circles back in the 1890s. Zinaida married Gleb Кrzhizhanovky in 1899, who in the 1920s headed the GOELRO Commission.
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Antoinette de Vaucouleurs
1921 - 1987 (66 years)
Antoinette de Vaucouleurs was an astronomer who worked in the Astronomy Department of the University of Texas at Austin for 25 years when few women worked in the field. In addition to ongoing collaborations with her husband, Gérard de Vaucouleurs, she carried out her own research in spectroscopy. Her contributions were recognized in a festschrift in 1988, entitled The World of Galaxies.
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Carolyn Parker
1917 - 1966 (49 years)
Carolyn Beatrice Parker was a physicist who worked from 1943 to 1947 on the Dayton Project, the polonium research and development arm of the Manhattan Project. She was one of a small number of African American scientists and technicians on the Manhattan Project. She then became an assistant professor in physics at Fisk University.
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Maria Margaretha Kirch
1670 - 1720 (50 years)
Maria Margaretha Kirch was a German astronomer. She was one of the first famous astronomers of her period due to her writing on the conjunction of the sun with Saturn, Venus, and Jupiter in 1709 and 1712 respectively.
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Sonia Cotelle
1896 - 1945 (49 years)
Sonia Cotelle, née Slobodkine , was a Polish radiochemist. Life and work Sonia Cotelle was born in Warsaw, capital of the Vistula Land, in the Russian Empire on 19 June 1896. She was married, but later divorced. She graduated from the University of Paris in 1922, where she majored in chemistry. While still a student she began working in 1919 as an assistant in the Institute of Radium founded by the Nobel Laureates, Marie Curie and her husband Pierre, in the university's Faculty of Science . Cotelle was in charge of the measurement service between 1924 and 1926, after which she was appointed as a chemist in the Faculté des sciences.
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Nadiashda Galli-Shohat
1879 - 1948 (69 years)
Nadiashda or Nadejda Galli-Shohat was a Russian physicist. Born Nadiashda Kokaoulina in Siberia, she graduated from the Women's University of Petrograd in 1903, joined the Bolshevik Party after the 1905 Russian Revolution, and took the name Galli upon marrying her first husband. She received her doctorate from Göttingen in 1914, worked at the Yekaterinburg Meteorological Observatory from 1915 to 1917, and from 1917 to 1922 was professor and chair of the physics department at Ural Federal University, after which she worked at the University of Petrograd's State Optical Institute. Together with...
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Hertha Sponer
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Hertha Sponer was a German physicist and chemist who contributed to modern quantum mechanics and molecular physics and was the first woman on the physics faculty of Duke University. She was the older sister of philologist and resistance fighter Margot Sponer.
Go to ProfileAlysia Diane Marino is an American experimental particle physicist. She is the Jesse L. Mitchell Endowed Chair at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In 2022, Marino was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society for "major contributions to understanding the physics of neutrino production and interactions, and for leadership in data analysis in the T2K and NA61/SHINE collaborations."
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Frances Woodworth Wright
1897 - 1989 (92 years)
Frances Woodworth Wright was an American astronomer based at Harvard University. During World War II, she taught celestial navigation to military officers and engineers. Early life Frances Woodworth Wright was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the daughter of George William Wright and Nellie Woodworth Wright. As a child in 1907, Wright wrote a short essay titled "My Favorite Poem", for the popular national children's magazine St. Nicholas. She earned a bachelor's degree at Brown University in 1920. She was granted a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College in 1958, as a student of Fred Whipp...
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Frances Lowater
1871 - 1956 (85 years)
Frances Lowater was a British-American physicist and astronomer. Life and career Lowater studied in England for her undergraduate degrees, at University College, Nottingham, and Newnham College, Cambridge. She then moved to the United States, where she attended Bryn Mawr College and earned her Ph.D. in 1906. While studying for her Ph.D., she took a position as a physics demonstrator, and remained in that position until 1910. She spent a year at Westfield College and four years at Rockford College, then moved to Wellesley College, where she spent the rest of her career; with the exception of a...
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Valerie Myerscough
1942 - 1980 (38 years)
Valerie Patricia Myerscough was a British mathematician and astrophysicist remembered for her precocious talent and great contributions to a range of astrophysical applications, as well as to the evolution of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a very short life.
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Gerta von Ubisch
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Gerta von Ubisch was a German physicist, geneticist, and botanist. She studied barley and found a genetic explanation for heterostyly. In 1933 she lost her position at Heidelberg University because of her Jewish heritage.
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Vibert Douglas
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Allie Vibert Douglas, , who usually went by her middle name, was a Canadian astronomer and astrophysicist. Life Douglas was born in Montreal, Quebec, on 15 December 1894. Because both of Douglas' parents died the year she was born, she first lived in London, England with her brother George Vibert Douglas, and her grandmother. Douglas' grandfather was Rev. George Douglas, a prominent Methodist minister and educator. In 1904 both Douglas and her brother returned to Montreal where they attended Westmount High School. Growing up, Douglas was interested in science but felt that her gender was a handicap.
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Alice Hall Farnsworth
1893 - 1960 (67 years)
Alice Hall Farnsworth was an American astronomer. She was director of John Payson Williston Observatory at Mount Holyoke College from 1936 until her retirement in 1957. Early life Alice Hall Farnsworth was born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, the youngest of four children of Frederick Tudor Farnsworth and Anna Caroline Tufts Farnsworth. As a child, she was an active reader of St. Nicholas magazine, submitting contest entries and winning prizes.
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Henrietta Hill Swope
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Henrietta Hill Swope was an American astronomer who studied variable stars. In particular, she measured the period-luminosity relation for Cepheid stars, which are bright variable stars whose periods of variability relate directly to their intrinsic luminosities. Their measured periods can therefore be related to their distances and used to measure the size of the Milky Way and distances to other galaxies.
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Mildred Allen
1894 - 1990 (96 years)
Mildred Allen was an American physicist. Biography Early life and education Mildred Allen was born in Sharon, Massachusetts to MIT professor C. Frank Allen and Caroline Hadley Allen. She had one younger sister, Margaret Allen Anderson.
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Martha Betz Shapley
1890 - 1981 (91 years)
Martha Betz Shapley was an American astronomer known for her research on eclipsing binary stars. Early life Shapley was born on August 3, 1890, in Kansas City, Missouri, one of seven children of school music teacher Carl Betz and his wife. Her family were descendants of German immigrants, and her grandfather once told her that he had seen astronomer Caroline Herschel in the streets of Hanover in Germany. Her mother and two sisters became schoolteachers, and Shapley herself became a schoolteacher at age 15. Three years later, she began her studies at the University of Missouri, where she earn...
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Carlotta Maury
1874 - 1938 (64 years)
Carlotta Joaquina Maury was a geologist, stratigrapher, paleontologist, and was one of the first women to work as a professional scientist in the oil and gas industry. She worked as a palaeontologist within an oil company; she was a petroleum geologist at Royal Dutch Shell. Maury focused on Tertiary mollusks. Maury initially taught in universities after attending Cornell University finishing with a PhD in 1902, although she had trouble achieving a full-time position. However, she really wanted to pursue paleontological expeditions. Even though she went on to later be successful, there were still elements of difficulty in her early career, in some ways due to her gender.
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Maria Pogonowska
1897 - 2009 (112 years)
Maria Pogonowska was a Polish-Israeli scientist of Jewish origin. She was a doctor of physics. Biography Maria Asterblum was born in Warsaw. Her father was Maurycy, a lawyer and her mother Salomea. In 1915, she entered the Warsaw University, newly opened after the Russians left Warsaw, studying physics. She was one of only four women admitted in the first year of studies. In 1924, she became the first doctor promoted by the Department of Physics; her doctoral advisor was Stefan Pieńkowski. She worked as a senior assistant at the Department of Experimental Physics at Warsaw University and has ...
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Elisabeth Rotten
1882 - 1964 (82 years)
Elisabeth Friederike Rotten was a Quaker peace activist and educational progressive. Life As daughter to the Swiss couple Moritz and Luise Rotten, she attended the "höhere Mädchenschule Luisenschule" during 1888-1898, later studying at the Victoria-Lyzeum Berlin from 1904. In September 1906 she took the Reifeprüfung at the Kaiserin Augusta-Gymnasium Charlottenburg. She graduated in her studies in philosophy and German language and literature in Heidelberg, Berlin, Marburg and Montpellier. In Marburg she met with Hermann Lietz and Gustav Wyneken, which was vital to the future development of her thinking.
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Gladys Mackenzie
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Gladys Isabel Harper was a Scottish physicist who studied X-rays. She taught physics at Newnham College, Cambridge and was a research fellow of the University of Bristol. She conducted research in X-ray physics, focusing on topics such as alpha particles, X-ray monochromatization, and spectroscopy. Her research of alpha particles proved that the theory of Gaunt can also be applied to molecular hydrogen. She also developed through her research of crystal and slit systems a quantitative general theory for analysis of composite radiation and production of monochromatic beams. She attended the University of Edinburgh and graduated with an MA and BSc in mathematics and natural philosophy.
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Isabelle Stone
1868 - 1966 (98 years)
Isabelle Stone was an American physicist and educator. She was one of the founders of the American Physical Society. She was among the first women to earn a PhD in physics in the United States. Early life and education Stone was born in 1868 to Harriet H. Leonard Stone and Leander Stone in Chicago. She completed a bachelor's degree at Wellesley College in 1890, and was among the first women to earn a PhD in physics in the United States, earning hers just two years after Caroline Willard Baldwin earned a Doctor of Science at Cornell University. Stone completed doctoral work at the University of Chicago.
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Geertruida de Haas-Lorentz
1885 - 1973 (88 years)
Geertruida Luberta de Haas-Lorentz was a Dutch physicist and the first to perform fluctuational analysis of electrons as Brownian particles. Consequently she is considered to be the first woman to work in electrical noise theory.
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Édmée Chandon
1885 - 1944 (59 years)
Édmée Marie Juliette Chandon was an astronomer known for being the first professional female astronomer in France. She worked at the Paris Observatory from 1908 until her retirement in 1941. Biography The eldest of five children, Chandon was born to Marie Duhan and merchant François Chandon on 21 November 1885 in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. In July 1906, she completed her degree in Mathematical Sciences at the Faculté des sciences de Paris. She began working at the Paris Observatory in November 1908 as a trainee, where she met Jacques Jean Trousset after he joined her team in January 1909.
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Ruth Stokes
1890 - 1968 (78 years)
Ruth Wyckliffe Stokes was an American mathematician, cryptologist, and astronomer. She earned the first doctorate in mathematics from Duke University, made pioneering contributions to the theory of linear programming, and founded the Pi Mu Epsilon journal.
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Fanny Gates
1872 - 1931 (59 years)
Fanny Cook Gates was an American physicist, an American Physical Society fellow and American Mathematical Society member. She made contributions to the research of radioactive materials, determining that radioactivity could not be destroyed by heat or ionization due to chemical reactions, and that radioactive materials differ from phosphorescent materials both qualitatively and quantitatively. More specifically, Gates showed that the emission of blue light from quinine was temperature dependent, providing evidence that the emitted light is produced from phosphorescence rather than radioactive decay.
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Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen
1887 - 1974 (87 years)
Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen was a Dutch physicist known for her early contributions to the theory of magnetism. She studied at Leiden University under the guidance of Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, obtaining her doctorate in 1919. Her thesis explained why magnetism is an essentially quantum mechanical effect, a result now referred to as the Bohr–Van Leeuwen theorem. She continued to investigate magnetic materials at the "Technische Hogeschool Delft" , first as "assistant" between September 1920 and April 1947, and then she was promoted to "lector in de theoretische en toegepaste natuurkunde" .
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Maria Mitchell
1818 - 1889 (71 years)
Maria Mitchell was an American astronomer, librarian, naturalist, and educator. In 1847, she discovered a comet named 1847 VI that was later known as "Miss Mitchell's Comet" in her honor. She won a gold medal prize for her discovery, which was presented to her by King Christian VIII of Denmark in 1848. Mitchell was the first internationally known woman to work as both a professional astronomer and a professor of astronomy after accepting a position at Vassar College in 1865. She was also the first woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association ...
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Iris Runge
1888 - 1966 (78 years)
Iris Anna Runge was a German applied mathematician and physicist. Life and work Iris Runge was the eldest of six children of mathematician Carl Runge. She started studying physics, mathematics, and geography at the University of Göttingen in 1907, with the aim of becoming a teacher. At that time, she only attended the lectures, since women were not allowed to formally study at Prussian universities until 1908–1909. She attended lectures given by her father and spent a semester at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich working with Arnold Sommerfeld, which led to her first publication, Anwendungen der Vektorrechnung auf die Grundlagen der Geometrischen Optik in Annalen der Physik .
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Adelaide Ames
1900 - 1932 (32 years)
Adelaide Ames was an American astronomer and research assistant at Harvard University. She contributed to the study of galaxies with her co-authorship of A Survey of the External Galaxies Brighter Than the Thirteenth Magnitude, which was later known as the Shapley-Ames catalog. Ames was a member of the American Astronomical Society. She was a contemporary of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and her closest friend at the observatory.
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Eva von Bahr
1874 - 1962 (88 years)
Eva Wilhelmina Julia von Bahr-Bergius, was a Swedish physicist and teacher at a folk high school. She was the first woman in Sweden to become a docent in physics. She is known for her contact with and support of the poet Dan Andersson, for her friendship and support of the physicist Lise Meitner, and as a Catholic writer.
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Toshiko Yuasa
1909 - 1980 (71 years)
Toshiko Yuasa was a Japanese nuclear physicist who worked in France. She was the first Japanese female physicist. Early life and education Yuasa was born in Taitō Ward, Tokyo, in 1909. Her father was an engineer who worked for the Japanese patent office. Her mother was from a traditional literary family – her mother's grandfather was Tachibana Moribe. Toshiko was the second-youngest of seven children. She attended the Division of Science at Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School from 1927 until her graduation in 1931. She then enrolled in the Department of Physics at Tokyo Bunrika University , making her the first woman in Japan to study physics.
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Klavdiâ Barkhatova
1917 - 1990 (73 years)
Klavdiya Aleksandrovna Barkhatova was a Soviet astronomer. She became notable for he studies into stellar astronomy and eventually became a highly respected specialist in the field, producing a large body of scientific works. Kourovka Astronomical Observatory in Kourovka, Sverdlovsk Oblast is named in her honor.
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Agnes Mary Clerke
1842 - 1907 (65 years)
Agnes Mary Clerke was an Irish astronomer and writer, mainly in the field of astronomy. She was born in Skibbereen, County Cork, Ireland, and died in London. Family Agnes Clerke was the daughter of John William Clerke who was, at the time, a bank manager in Skibbereen, and his wife Catherine Mary Deasy whose father was a judge's registrar. She had two siblings; her older sister, Ellen Mary and her younger brother, Aubrey St. John . Her elder sister Ellen also wrote about astronomy. All of the Clerke children were entirely home schooled.
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Margaret Eliza Maltby
1860 - 1944 (84 years)
Margaret Eliza Maltby was an American physicist notable for her measurement of high electrolytic resistances and conductivity of very dilute solutions. Maltby was the first woman to earn a Bachelor of Science degree from MIT, where she had to enroll as a "special" student because the institution did not accept female students. Maltby was also the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Göttingen in 1895.
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Priscilla Fairfield Bok
1896 - 1975 (79 years)
Priscilla Fairfield Bok was an American astronomer and the wife of Dutch-born astronomer Bart Bok, Director of Mount Stromlo Observatory in Australia and later of Steward Observatory in Arizona, US. Their harmonious marriage accompanied the four decades of their close scientific collaboration, in which "it is difficult and pointless to separate his achievements from hers". They co-authored a number of academic papers on star clusters, stellar magnitudess, and the structure of the Milky Way galaxy. The Boks displayed great mutual enthusiasm for explaining astronomy to the public: described as ...
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Anne Sewell Young
1871 - 1961 (90 years)
Anne Sewell Young was an American astronomer. She was an astronomy professor at Mount Holyoke College for 37 years. Biography Anne Sewell Young was born in Bloomington, Wisconsin on January 2, 1871, to Reverend Albert Adams Young and Mary Sewell.
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Elsa Neumann
1872 - 1902 (30 years)
Elsa Neumann was a German physicist. She was the first woman to receive a PhD in physics from the University of Berlin, in 1899. Early life and education Elsa was the daughter of Maximilian and Anna née Meyer, an older brother was the ornithologist Oscar Neumann while a sister Alice was a sculptor. As a woman, Elsa Neumann was generally denied access to higher education. In 1890 she graduated with a Lehrerinnenprüfung , a degree that did not require higher education at that time and was considered less than a Realgymnasium education. Thus she took private lessons with various professors in order to acquire the advanced knowledge and skills necessary for university-level studies.
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Margrete Heiberg Bose
1865 - 1952 (87 years)
Margrete Elisabeth Heiberg Bose was an Argentine physicist of Danish origin, the first woman to receive a chemistry degree in Denmark, possibly the first female physicist to work in Latin America and one of the first in the Americas.
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Annie S. D. Maunder
1868 - 1947 (79 years)
Annie Scott Dill Maunder was an Irish-British astronomer, who recorded the first evidence of the movement of sunspot emergence from the poles toward the equator over the Sun's 11-year cycle. She was one of the leading astronomers of her time, but because of her gender, her contribution was often underplayed at the time. In 1916 she was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society, 21 years after being refused membership because of her gender.
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