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List of the most influential female people in Physics,

#1451

Jane Dewey

1900 - 1976 (76 years)

Jane Mary Dewey was an American physicist. Early life and education Jane Mary Dewey was born in Chicago, the daughter of philosopher John Dewey and educator Alice Chipman Dewey. Her parents named her in honor of Jane Addams, an activist, sociologist and reformer; and Mary Rozet Smith, a philanthropist who was Addams's longtime companion.

#1452

Maud Worcester Makemson

1891 - 1977 (86 years)

Maud Worcester Makemson was an American astronomer, a specialist on archaeoastronomy, and director of Vassar Observatory. Early life and education Maud Lavon Worcester was born in 1891 in Center Harbor, New Hampshire. She attended Girls' Latin School in Boston. She briefly attended Radcliffe College, but left to teach school. In 1911, her family moved to Pasadena, California. She was working as a journalist in Bisbee, Arizona when she took an interest in astronomy. She returned to California and taught school while taking correspondence courses and summer classes to qualify for admission to the University of California.

#1453

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...

#1454

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.

#1455

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.

#1456

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.

#1457

Alice Hall Farnsworth

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.

#1458

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.

#1459

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.

#1460

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...

#1461

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.

#1462

Elizabeth Laird

1874 - 1969 (95 years)

Elizabeth Rebecca Laird was a Canadian physicist who chaired the physics department at Mount Holyoke College for nearly four decades. She was the first woman accepted by Sir J. J. Thomson to conduct research at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory. In her later life she studied electromagnetic radiation for military and medical applications.

#1463

Beryl May Dent

1900 - 1977 (77 years)

Beryl May Dent was an English mathematical physicist, technical librarian, and a programmer of early analogue and digital computers to solve electrical engineering problems. She was born in Chippenham, Wiltshire, the eldest daughter of schoolteachers. The family left Chippenham in 1901, after her father became head teacher of the then recently established Warminster County School. In 1923, she graduated from the University of Bristol with First Class Honours in applied mathematics. She was awarded the Ashworth Hallett scholarship by the university and was accepted as a postgraduate student a...

#1464

Elizabeth Alexander

Elizabeth Alexander

1908 - 1958 (50 years)

Frances Elizabeth Somerville Alexander was a British geologist, academic, and physicist, whose wartime work with radar and radio led to early developments in radio astronomy and whose post-war work on the geology of Singapore is considered a significant foundation to contemporary research. Alexander earned her PhD from Newnham College, Cambridge, and worked in Radio Direction Finding at Singapore Naval Base from 1938 to 1941. In January 1941, unable to return to Singapore from New Zealand, she became Head of Operations Research in New Zealand's Radio Development Lab, Wellington. In 1945, Alex...

#1465

Margaretta Palmer

1862 - 1924 (62 years)

Margaretta Palmer was an American astronomer, one of the first women to earn a doctorate in astronomy. She worked at the Yale University Observatory at a time when woman were frequently hired as assistant astronomers, but when most of these women had only a high school education, so Palmer's advanced degree made her unusual for her time.

#1466

Julie Vinter Hansen

Julie Vinter Hansen

1890 - 1960 (70 years)

Julie Marie Vinter Hansen was a Danish astronomer. Life Early life Vinter Hansen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. Education While studying at the University of Copenhagen, she was appointed a computer at the University's observatory in 1915. In the pre-electronic era, computers were humans that worked doing hand calculations at the direction of astronomers. She was the first woman to hold an appointment at the University. She was later appointed observatory assistant and, in 1922, observer.

#1467

Sarah Frances Whiting

Sarah Frances Whiting

1847 - 1927 (80 years)

Sarah Frances Whiting was an American physicist and astronomer. She was one of the founders and the first director of the Whitin Observatory at Wellesley College. She instructed several notable astronomers and physicists, including Annie Jump Cannon.

#1468

Louise Sherwood McDowell

Louise Sherwood McDowell

1876 - 1966 (90 years)

Louise Sherwood McDowell was an American physicist and educator. She spent most of her career as a professor of physics at Wellesley College and is best known for being one of the first female scientists to work at the United States Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

#1469

Ida Barney

1886 - 1982 (96 years)

Ida Barney was an American astronomer, best known for her 22 volumes of astrometric measurements on 150,000 stars. She was educated at Smith College and Yale University and spent most of her career at the Yale University Observatory. She was the 1952 recipient of the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy.

#1470

Marie Curie

1867 - 1934 (67 years)

Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie , known simply as Marie Curie , was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. Her husband, Pierre Curie, was a co-winner of her first Nobel Prize, making them the first-ever married couple to win the Nobel Prize and launching the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. She was, in 1906, the first woman to become a professor at the University o...

#1471

Hertha Wambacher

1903 - 1950 (47 years)

Hertha Wambacher was an Austrian physicist. Education After having obtained the general certificate of education from the girls' high school run by the Association for the Extended Education of Women in 1922, she studied first chemistry, then physics at the University of Vienna.

#1472

Harriet Brooks

1876 - 1933 (57 years)

Harriet Brooks was the first Canadian female nuclear physicist. She is most famous for her research in radioactivity. She discovered atomic recoil, and transmutation of elements in radioactive decay. Ernest Rutherford, who guided her graduate work, regarded her as comparable to Marie Curie in the calibre of her aptitude. She was among the first persons to discover radon and to try to determine its atomic mass.

#1473

Alice Leigh-Smith

1907 - 1987 (80 years)

Alice Leigh-Smith , born September 11, 1907, was a Croatian born nuclear physicist. She is best known for being the first woman in British history to receive a PhD in nuclear physics. Additionally, she is remembered for her pioneering research in cancer and for her attempts in the discovery of an elusive element, Element 85.

#1474

Johanna Geertruida van Cittert-Eymers

1903 - 1988 (85 years)

Johanna Geertruida van Cittert-Eymers was a Dutch physicist, historian of science, museum director and author. Early years Johanna Geertruida Eymers was born in Velp, in the Netherlands on 19 June 1903, the only child of teacher Johan Anton Eymers and Johanna Hermina Aleida Huetinck. She graduated from secondary school with a HBS-b diploma in Arnhem in 1921 and moved to Utrecht to begin studying physics at the university there in 1923.

#1475

Lois Tripp Slocum

Lois Tripp Slocum

1899 - 1951 (52 years)

Lois Tripp Slocum was an American astronomer. She taught astronomy at Wellesley College, Smith College, and Wilson College during her career. Early life Lois Tripp Slocum was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the daughter of Edward Manchester Slocum and Eleanor Victoria Tripp Slocum. She graduated from Smith College in 1921, adding a master's degree in 1924. She held a Lick Observatory fellowship, and earned a Ph.D. at the University of California in 1930, completing a dissertation titled "A study of color indices of faint stars in five selected areas in the Milky Way" under advisor Robert J.

#1476

Margarete Gussow

1896 - 2000 (104 years)

Margarete Gussow was a German astronomer. Biography Gussow studied mathematics, astronomy and physics in Berlin. In 1924, she was made an assistant at the observatory. In 1933, she joined the Nazi Party. In 1936, she published work on Epsilon Aurigae.

#1477

Sonja Ashauer

1923 - 1948 (25 years)

Sonja Ashauer was a Brazilian physicist. She was the first Brazilian woman to earn a doctorate in physics, and the second to become a physics graduate in Brazil. Biography Born in São Paulo, Ashauer was the daughter of the German-born engineer Walter Ashauer and his wife Herta Graffenbenger. From 1935 to 1939, she pursued her secondary education at Gymnasium of São Paulo state capital. Encouraged by her father, after secondary school, she studied physics under Gleb Wataghin at the University of São Paulo, graduating in 1942. She was the second female physics graduate in Brazil, the first bein...

#1478

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 ...

#1479

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.

#1480

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.

#1481

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.

#1482

Geertruida de Haas-Lorentz

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.

#1483

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.

#1484

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.

#1485

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.

#1486

Annie Jump Cannon

Annie Jump Cannon

1863 - 1941 (78 years)

Annie Jump Cannon was an American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. With Edward C. Pickering, she is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which was the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures and spectral types. She was nearly deaf throughout her career after 1893, as a result of scarlet fever. She was a suffragist and a member of the National Women's Party.

#1487

Irène Joliot-Curie

Irène Joliot-Curie

1897 - 1956 (59 years)

Irène Joliot-Curie was a French chemist, physicist and politician, the elder daughter of Pierre Curie and Marie Skłodowska–Curie, and the wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Jointly with her husband, Joliot-Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of induced radioactivity, making them the second-ever married couple to win the Nobel Prize, while adding to the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. This made the Curies the family with the most Nobel laureates to date. She was also one of the first three women to be a member of a French government, becoming undersecretary for Scientific Research under the Popular Front in 1936.

#1488

Caroline Herschel

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.

#1489

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

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.

#1490

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...

#1491

Laura Bassi

1711 - 1778 (67 years)

Laura Maria Caterina Bassi Veratti was an Italian physicist and academic. Recognized and depicted as "Minerva" , she was the first woman to have a doctorate in science, and the second woman in the world to earn the Doctor of Philosophy degree. Working at the University of Bologna, she was also the first salaried female teacher in a university. At one time the highest paid employee of the university, by the end of her life Bassi held two other professorships. She was also the first female member of any scientific establishment, when she was elected to the Academy of Sciences of the Institute o...

#1492

Klara Döpel

1900 - 1945 (45 years)

Klara Renate Döpel was a feminist and a German lawyer until 1933. Then she married the German nuclear physicist Robert Döpel, and they worked together as a team at Leipzig University studying nuclear reactor configurations for the German nuclear energy project. Klara was killed in an air raid near the end of World War II.

#1493

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

1868 - 1921 (53 years)

Henrietta Swan Leavitt was an American astronomer. Her discovery of how to effectively measure vast distances to remote galaxies led to a shift in the understanding of the nature of the universe. A graduate of Radcliffe College, she worked at the Harvard College Observatory as a human computer, tasked with measuring photographic plates to catalog the positions and brightness of stars. This work led her to discover the relation between the luminosity and the period of Cepheid variables. Leavitt's discovery provided astronomers with the first standard candle with which to measure the distance t...

#1494

Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen

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" .

#1495

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 ...

#1496

Hedwig Kohn

1887 - 1964 (77 years)

Hedwig Kohn was a physicist who was one of only three women to obtain habilitation in physics in Germany before World War II. Born in Breslau in the German Empire , she was forced to leave Germany during the Nazi regime because she was Jewish. She continued her academic career in the United States, where she settled for the rest of her life.

#1497

Marguerite Perey

Marguerite Perey

1909 - 1975 (66 years)

Marguerite Catherine Perey was a French physicist and a student of Marie Curie. In 1939, Perey discovered the element francium by purifying samples of lanthanum that contained actinium. In 1962, she was the first woman to be elected to the French Académie des Sciences, an honor denied to her mentor Curie. Perey died of cancer in 1975.

#1498

Tatyana Afanasyeva

Tatyana Afanasyeva

1876 - 1964 (88 years)

Tatyana Alexeyevna Afanasyeva was a Russian-Dutch mathematician and physicist who made contributions to the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics. On 21 December 1904, she married Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest . They had two daughters and two sons; one daughter, Tatyana Ehrenfest, also became a mathematician.

#1499

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 .

#1500

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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