POSTED 24 MARCH 2005
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science." We really, really hate to argue with Ralph, but we're pretty sure women have made some important contributions to science, too.
Though unsung in their own day, women like Rosalind Franklin, who helped discover the structure of DNA, enjoy a certain amount of celebrity for their scientific advances. Hopefully, in time, more women will be as recognized and respected for their roles in laboratories, observatories and academia. Here are a few of our favorite women scientists from the past.
Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179)
Hildegard von Bingen was a multi-talented German abbess in the 12th century who wrote two books about human health in a time when few people of either sex wrote, let alone concerned themselves with science. In addition to her music composition, preaching and poetry, she studied the relationship of the human body to the world as a whole. She was skilled in herbal healing and other medical lore. Her books detail more than 2,000 remedies and health suggestions. And Hildegard's interest in nature didn't end there. She also covered topics ranging from accounts of more than two hundred plants, precious stones, fish, birds, mammals, and reptiles to cosmology and the place of humanity in the world. Beuroner
Kunstverlag, ca. 1920, courtesy of Saint John's Abbey
Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (1815 - 1851)
With
a name like that, you'd have to be the daughter of Romanic poet, Lord
Byron. Ada Byron never
knew her father (her parents separated when she was one month old) and was raised
by her mother in hopes she would turn out to be his opposite. Ada was tutored
in mathematics and music at a time when women were not encouraged to follow intellectual
pursuits. As Ada moved through English society , she met Charles Babbage, famed
professor of mathematics at Cambridge who invented a calculating machine called
the Difference Engine. Ada and Babbage corresponded about mathematics, logic
and, as the friendship grew, life. Photo:
UK
Department for Culture, Media and Sport
In 1834, Babbage drew up plans for a different kind of calculating machine, called the Analytical Engine. He reported on the developments in his research in Turin, Italy in 1841. An Italian in the crowd, Menabrea, wrote an article in French about what Babbage described. Babbage enlisted Ada to translate the article. She presented her translation of that article to Babbage and included suggestions about how he could make his Engine work. Those notes are her claim to fame. She correctly predicted that the Analytical Engine could be used to compose complex music, produce graphics and be used for practical and scientific use.
In her notes, Ada also suggested how Babbage's engine could calculate numbers. This plan is now widely recognized as the first computer program. In recognition, a software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense was named "Ada."
Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941)
Annie Jump
Cannon was hired by Harvard College Observatory in 1896 to catalogue
variable stars and classify the spectra of southern stars for the
bargain basement price of 50 cents an hour. Cannon exceeded all
expectations by working for more than 40 years and discovering more than 300
variable stars. That alone was spectacular; however, Cannon's real
specialty was classifying the characteristics of stars -- over 350,000
of them. Cannon created a mnemonic device to name all spectral
classifications of stars still used today: Oh, Be A Fine Girl - Kiss
Me. Photo: NASA
Cannon published information about 225,000 stars in the Henry Draper Catalog, which is still accepted as an international standard. Throughout her career she received many honors, including a doctorate from Oxford University (the first honorary degree awarded to a woman from that institution) and the Draper Award by the National Academy of Sciences. In 1923, she was voted one of the 12 greatest living women in America. Now, she is an award herself. The American Association of University Women presents the Annie J. Cannon Award each year to a woman beginning her astronomical career.
Grace Murray Hopper (1906 - 1992)
Rear
Admiral. Ph.D. Physicist. Mathematician. Professor. Was there anything Grace
Murray Hopper couldn't do? She began her career as a mathematics instructor
at Vassar in 1931 with a salary of $800 dollars a year. Three years later, she
completed her Ph.D. at Yale and became an associate professor--presumably for
more money. With the outbreak of World War II, Hopper joined the Navy and was
stationed at the Bureau of Ordinance Computation at Harvard University. During
her time in the Navy she contributed to the efforts to calculate aiming angles
for Naval guns in varying weather conditions and helped popularize the term "bug" for
a computer glitch. Hopper joined the emerging field of computer science.Her most
important contribution was a computer program that translates English language
instructions into the language of the target computer in hopes, she said, that, "the
programmer may return to being a mathematician." Photo: US
Navy
Hopper holds honorary doctorates from over 30 universities, yet she always felt as though she had yet to prove herself to her colleagues. In frustration, Hopper was known to exclaim, "If you do something once, people will call it an accident. If you do it twice, they call it a coincidence. But do it a third time and you've just proven a natural law!"
She died on January 1, 1992 and was buried with full Naval honors in Arlington National Cemetery.
--Megan "Girls Rule" Anderson
Megan Anderson, project assistant; Terry Devitt, editor; S.V. Medaris, designer/illustrator; David Tenenbaum, feature writer; Amy Toburen, content development executive