Historical timeline of women involved in natural, social and formal sciences
This is a timeline of women in science, spanning from ancient history up to the 21st century. While the timeline primarily focuses on women involved with
natural sciences such as astronomy, biology, chemistry and physics, it also includes women from the
social sciences (e.g. sociology, psychology) and the
formal sciences (e.g. mathematics, computer science), as well as notable
science educators and
medical scientists. The chronological events listed in the timeline relate to both scientific achievements and gender equality within the sciences.
Ancient history
1900 BCE: Aganice, also known as Athyrta, was an Egyptian princess during the Middle Kingdom (about 2000–1700 BCE) working on astronomy and natural philosophy.[1]
c. 1500 BCE:
Hatshepsut, also known as the Queen Doctor, promoted a botanical expedition searching for
officinal plants.[1]
1200 BCE: The Mesopotamian perfume-maker
Tapputi-Belatekallim was referenced in the text of a
cuneiform tablet. She is often considered the world's first recorded chemist.[2]
c. 150 BCE:
Aglaonice became the first female astronomer to be recorded in Ancient Greece.[3][4]
1st century BCE: A woman known only as
Fang became the earliest recorded Chinese female
alchemist. She is credited with "the discovery of how to turn mercury into silver" – possibly the chemical process of boiling off mercury in order to extract pure silver residue from ores.[5]
1st century CE:
Mary the Jewess was among the world's first alchemists.[6]
c. 300–350 CE: Greek mathematician
Pandrosion develops a numerical approximation for cube roots.[7]
c. 355–415 CE: Greek astronomer, mathematician and philosopher
Hypatia became renowned as a respected academic teacher, commentator on mathematics, and head of her own science academy.[8][9]
c. 975 CE: Chinese alchemist
Keng Hsien-Seng was employed by the Royal Court. She distilled perfumes, utilized an early form of the
Soxhlet process to extract camphor into alcohol, and gained recognition for her skill in using mercury to extract silver from ores.[5][11]
1561: Italian alchemist
Isabella Cortese published her popular book The Secrets of Lady Isabella Cortese. The work included recipes for medicines, distilled oils and cosmetics, and was the only book published by a female alchemist in the 16th century.[19]
1572: Italian botanist
Loredana Marcello died from the
plague – but not before developing several effective
palliative formulas for plague sufferers, which were used by many physicians.[20][21]
1572: Danish scientist
Sophia Brahe (1556–1643) assisted her brother
Tycho Brahe with his astronomical observations.[22]
1590: After her husband's death,
Caterina Vitale took over his position as chief pharmacist to the
Order of St John, becoming the first female chemist and pharmacist in
Malta.[23][24]
1636:
Anna Maria van Schurman is the first woman ever to attend university lectures.[26] She had to sit behind a screen so that her male fellow students would not see her.
1642:
Martine Bertereau, the first recorded female
mineralogist, was imprisoned in France on suspicion of witchcraft. Bertereau had published two written works on the science of mining and
metallurgy before being arrested.[5]
1650:
Silesian astronomer
Maria Cunitz published Urania Propitia, a work that both simplified and substantially improved
Johannes Kepler's mathematical methods for locating planets. The book was published in both Latin and German, an unconventional decision that made the scientific text more accessible for non-university educated readers.[27]
1656: French chemist and alchemist
Marie Meurdrac published her book La Chymie Charitable et Facile, en Faveur des Dames (Useful and Easy Chemistry, for the Benefit of Ladies).[28]
1667:
Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne (1623 – 15 December 1673) was an English aristocrat, philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction-writer, and playwright during the 17th century. She was the first woman to attend a meeting at the
Royal Society of London, in 1667, and she criticised and engaged with members and philosophers
Thomas Hobbes,
René Descartes, and
Robert Boyle.[29]
1668: After separating from her husband, French polymath
Marguerite de la Sablière established a popular
salon in Paris. Scientists and scholars from different countries visited the salon regularly to discuss ideas and share knowledge, and Sablière studied physics, astronomy and natural history with her guests.[30]
1680: French astronomer
Jeanne Dumée published a summary of arguments supporting the
Copernican theory of heliocentrism. She wrote "between the brain of a woman and that of a man there is no difference".[31]
1685: Frisian poet and archaeologist
Titia Brongersma supervised the first excavation of a
dolmen in
Borger, Netherlands. The excavation produced new evidence that the stone structures were graves constructed by prehistoric humans – rather than structures built by
giants, which had been the prior common belief.[32]
1690: German-Polish astronomer
Elisabetha Koopman Hevelius, widow of
Johannes Hevelius, whom she had assisted with his observations (and, probably, computations) for over twenty years, published in his name Prodromus Astronomiae, the largest and most accurate star catalog to that date.[33]
1693–1698: German astronomer and illustrator
Maria Clara Eimmart created more than 350 detailed drawings of the moon phases.[34]
1699: German entomologist
Maria Sibylla Merian, the first scientist to document the life cycle of insects for the public, embarked on a scientific expedition to
Suriname, South America. She subsequently published Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, a groundbreaking illustrated work on South American plants, animals and insects.[35]
18th century
1702: Pioneering English entomologist
Eleanor Glanville captured a butterfly specimen in
Lincolnshire, which was subsequently named the
Glanville fritillary in her honour. Her extensive butterfly collection impressed fellow entomologist William Vernon, who called Glanville's work "the noblest collection of butterflies, all English, which has sham'd us". Her butterfly specimens became part of early collections in the
Natural History Museum.[36][37]
1702: German astronomer
Maria Kirch became the first woman to discover a comet.[38]
c. 1702–1744: In
Montreal, Canada, French botanist
Catherine Jérémie collected plant specimens and studied their properties, sending the specimens and her detailed notes back to scientists in France.[39]
1732: At the age of 20, Italian physicist
Laura Bassi became the first female member of the
Bologna Academy of Sciences. One month later, she publicly defended her academic theses and received a PhD. Bassi was awarded an honorary position as professor of physics at the
University of Bologna. She was the first female physics professor in the world.[40]
1738: French polymath
Émilie du Châtelet became the first woman to have a paper published by the
Paris Academy, following a contest on the nature of fire.[41]
1740: French polymath
Émilie du Châtelet published Institutions de Physique (Foundations of Physics) providing a metaphysical basis for
Newtonian physics.[42]
1748: Swedish
agronomistEva Ekeblad became the first female member of the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Two years earlier, she had developed a new process of using potatoes to make flour and alcohol, which subsequently lessened Sweden's reliance on wheat crops and decreased the risk of famine.[43]
1751: 19-year-old Italian physicist
Cristina Roccati received her PhD from the University of Bologna.[44]
1755: After the death of her husband, Italian anatomist
Anna Morandi Manzolini took his place at the
University of Bologna, becoming a professor of
anatomy and establishing an internationally known laboratory for anatomical research.[46]
1760: American horticulturalist
Martha Daniell Logan began corresponding with botanic specialist and collector
John Bartram, regularly exchanging seeds, plants and botanical knowledge with him.[48]
1762: French astronomer
Nicole-Reine Lepaute calculated the time and percentage of a solar eclipse that had been predicted to occur in two years time. She created a map to show the phases, and published a table of her calculations in the 1763 edition of Connaissance des Temps.[47]
1766: French chemist
Geneviève Thiroux d'Arconville published her study on
putrefaction. The book presented her observations from more than 300 experiments over the span of five years, during which she attempted to discover factors necessary for the preservation of beef, eggs, and other foods. Her work was recommended for
royal privilege by fellow chemist
Pierre-Joseph Macquer.[49]
c. 1775: Herbalist/botanist
Jeanne Baret becomes the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.
c. 1775: French chemist, scientific artist and translator,
Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier began working with her husband chemist
Antoine Lavoisier. She was instrumental in the 1789 publication of her husband’s groundbreaking Elementary Treatise on Chemistry, which presented a unified view of chemistry as a field, as she drew diagrams of all the equipment used, and kept strict records that lended validity to the findings. She also translated and critiqued Richard Kirwan's 'Essay on Phlogiston and the Constitution of Acids' which led to the discovery of oxygen gas. [50]
1782–1791: French chemist and mineralogist
Claudine Picardet translated more than 800 pages of Swedish, German, English and Italian scientific papers into French, enabling French scientists to better discuss and utilize international research in chemistry, mineralogy and astronomy.[51]
c. 1787–1797: Self-taught Chinese astronomer
Wang Zhenyi published at least twelve books and multiple articles on astronomy and mathematics. Using a lamp, a mirror and a table, she once created a famous scientific exhibit designed to accurately simulate a lunar eclipse.[52][53]
1786–1797: German astronomer
Caroline Herschel discovered eight new comets,[54] along with numerous other discoveries.
1789: French astronomer
Louise du Pierry, the first Parisian woman to become an astronomy professor, taught the first astronomy courses specifically open to female students.[55]
c. 1796–1820: During the reign of the
Jiaqing Emperor, astronomer
Huang Lü became the first Chinese woman to work with optics and photographic images. She developed a telescope that could take simple photographic images using photosensitive paper.[52]
1797: English science writer and schoolmistress
Margaret Bryan published A Compendious System of Astronomy, including an engraving of herself and her two daughters. She dedicated the book to her students.[57]
1809:
Sabina Baldoncelli earned her university degree in pharmacy but was allowed to work only in the Italian orphanage where she resided.[59]
1815: English archaeologist
Lady Hester Stanhope used a medieval Italian manuscript to locate a promising archaeological site in
Ashkelon, becoming the first archaeologist to begin an excavation in the
Palestinian region. It was one of the earliest examples of the use of textual sources in field archaeology.[60]
1830–1837: Belgian botanist
Marie-Anne Libert published her four-volume Plantae cryptogamicae des Ardennes, a collection of 400 species of mosses, ferns, lichen, algae and fungi from the
Ardennes region. Her contributions to systemic
cryptogamic studies were formally recognized by Prussian emperor
Friedrich Wilhelm III, and Libert received a gold medal of merit.[63]
1833: English
phycologistsAmelia Griffiths and
Mary Wyatt published two books on local British seaweeds. Griffiths had an internationally respected reputation as a skilled seaweed collector and scholar, and Swedish botanist
Carl Agardh had earlier named the seaweed genus Griffithsia in her honour.[65]
1833
Orra White Hitchcock (March 8, 1796 – May 26, 1863) was one of America's earliest women botanical and scientific illustrators and artists, best known for illustrating the scientific works of her husband, geologist
Edward Hitchcock (1793–1864), but also notable for her own artistic and scientific work. The most well known appear in her husband's seminal works, the 1833 Report on the Geology, Mineralogy, Botany, and Zoology of Massachusetts and its successor, the 1841 Final Report produced when he was State Geologist. For the 1833 edition,
Pendleton's Lithography (Boston)
lithographed nine of Hitchcock's
Connecticut River Valley drawings and printed them as plates for the work. In 1841,
B. W. Thayer and Co., Lithographers (Boston) printed revised lithographs and an additional plate. The hand-colored plate "Autumnal Scenery. View in Amherst" is Hitchcock's most frequently seen work.[66]
1836: Early English geologist and
paleontologistEtheldred Benett, known for her extensive collection of several thousand fossils, was appointed a member of the Imperial Natural History Society of Moscow. The society – which only admitted men at the time – initially mistook Benett for a man due to her reputation as a scientist and her unusual first name, addressing her diploma of admission to "Dominum" (Master) Benett.[69][70]
1843: During a nine-month period in 1842–43, English mathematician
Ada Lovelace translated
Luigi Menabrea's article on
Charles Babbage's newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article, she appended a set of notes.[72] Her notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G. In note G, she describes an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is considered the first published algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and Ada Lovelace has often been cited as the first computer programmer for this reason.[73][74] The engine was never completed, so her program was never tested.[75]
1843: British botanist and pioneering photographer
Anna Atkins self-published her book Photographs of British Algae, illustrating the work with
cyanotypes. Her book was the first book on any subject to be illustrated by photographs.[76]
1848–1849: English scientist
Mary Anne Whitby, a pioneer in western
silkworm cultivation, collaborated with Charles Darwin in researching the hereditary qualities of silkworms.[79][80]
1854:
Mary Horner Lyell was a
conchologist and
geologist. She is most well known for her scientific work in 1854, where she studied her collection of land snails from the
Canary Islands. She was married to the notable British geologist
Charles Lyell and assisted him in his scientific work. It is believed by historians that she likely made major contributions to her husband's work.[82]
1854–1855:
Florence Nightingale organized care for wounded soldiers during the
Crimean War. She was an English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing. Her pie charts clearly showed that most deaths resulted from disease rather than battle wounds or "other causes," which led the general public to demand improved sanitation at field hospitals.[83]
1855: Working with her father, Welsh astronomer and photographer
Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn produced some of the earliest photographs of the moon.[84]
1862: Belgian botanist
Marie-Anne Libert became the first woman to join the Royal Botanical Society of Belgium. She was named an honorary member.[63]
1863: German naturalist
Amalie Dietrich arrived in Australia to collect plant, animal and anthropological specimens for the German
Godeffroy Museum. She remained in Australia for the next decade, discovering a number of new plant and animal species in the process, but also became notorious in later years for her removal of
Aboriginal skeletons – and the possible incitement of violence against Aboriginal people – for anthropological research purposes.[86][87]
1869/1870: American beekeeper
Ellen Smith Tupper became the first female editor of an entomological journal.[89]
1870:
Katharine Murray Lyell was a British botanist, author of an early book on the worldwide distribution of ferns, and editor of volumes of the correspondence of several of the era's notable scientists.[90]
1874:
Julia Lermontova became the first Russian woman to receive a PhD in chemistry.[92]
1875: Hungarian archaeologist
Zsófia Torma excavated the site of Turdaș-Luncă in
Hunedoara County, today in
Romania. The site, which uncovered valuable prehistoric artifacts, became one of the most important archaeological discoveries in Europe.[93]
1876–1878: American naturalist
Mary Treat studied
insectivorous plants in Florida. Her contributions to the scientific understanding of how these plants caught and digested prey were acknowledged by
Charles Darwin and
Asa Gray.[94]
1880: Self-taught German chemist
Agnes Pockels began investigating
surface tension, becoming a pioneering figure in the field of
surface science. The measurement equipment she developed provided the basic foundation for modern quantitative analyses of surface films.[97]
1888: American chemist
Josephine Silone Yates was appointed head of the Department of Natural Sciences at Lincoln Institute (later
Lincoln University), becoming the first black woman to head a college science department.[105][106]
1890: Austrian-born chemist
Ida Freund became the first woman to work as a university chemistry lecturer in the United Kingdom. She was promoted to full lecturer at
Newnham College, Cambridge.[108]
1892: American psychologist
Christine Ladd-Franklin presented her evolutionary theory on the development of
colour vision to the International Congress of Psychology. Her theory was the first to emphasize colour vision as an evolutionary trait.[citation needed]
1897: American cytologists and zoologists
Katharine Foot and
Ella Church Strobell started working as research partners. Together, they pioneered the practice of photographing microscopic research samples and invented a new technique for creating thin material samples in colder temperatures.[123]
1897: American physicist
Isabelle Stone became the first woman to receive a PhD in physics in the United States. She wrote her dissertation "On the Electrical Resistance of Thin Films" at the
University of Chicago.[124][125]
1900: American botanist
Anna Murray Vail became the first librarian of the
New York Botanical Garden. A key supporter of the institution's establishment, she had earlier donated her entire collection of 3000 botanical specimens to the garden.[130]
1900: Physicists
Marie Skłodowska–Curie and
Isabelle Stone attended the first International Congress of Physics in
Paris, France. They were the only two women out of 836 participants.[125]
1901: American Florence Bascom became the first female geologist to present a paper before the Geological Survey of Washington.[131]
1901: American astronomer
Annie Jump Cannon published her first catalog of stellar spectra, which
classified stars by temperature. This method was universally and permanently adopted by other astronomers.[133]
1903:
Grace Coleridge Frankland née Toynbee was an English microbiologist. Her most notable work was Bacteria in Daily Life. She was one of the nineteen female scientists who wrote the
1904 petition to the Chemical Society to request that they should create some female fellows of the society.[134]
1904: American geographer, geologist and educator
Zonia Baber published her article "The Scope of Geography", in which she laid out her educational theories on the teaching of geography. She argued that students required a more interdisciplinary, experiential approach to learning geography: instead of a reliance on textbooks, students needed field-trips, lab work and map-making knowledge. Baber's educational ideas transformed the way schools taught geography.[138]
1904:
Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (15 October 1880 – 2 October 1958) was a British author,
palaeobotanist and campaigner for
women's rights. She made significant contributions to plant palaeontology and coal classification. She held the post of Lecturer in Palaeobotany at the
University of Manchester from 1904 to 1910; in this capacity she became the first female academic of that university.[140] In 1909 she was elected to the
Linnean Society of London. She was 26 at the time of her election to Fellowship (the youngest woman admitted at that time).
1906: Following the
San Francisco earthquake, American botanist and curator
Alice Eastwood rescued almost 1500 rare plant specimens from the burning
California Academy of Sciences building. Her curation system of keeping type specimens separate from other collections – unconventional at the time – allowed her to quickly find and retrieve the specimens.[144]
1906: Russian chemist
Irma Goldberg published a paper on two newly discovered chemical reactions involving the presence of copper and the creation of a nitrogen-carbon bond to an aromatic halide. These reactions were subsequently named the
Goldberg reaction and the Jourdan-Ullman-Goldberg reaction.[145]
1906: After her death, English
lepidopteristEmma Hutchinson's collection of 20,000 butterflies and moths was donated to the
London Natural History Museum. She had published little during her lifetime, and was barred from joining local scientific societies due to her gender, but was honoured for her work when a variant form of the
comma butterfly was named hutchinsoni.[147]
1909: Danish physicist
Kirstine Meyer became the first Danish woman to receive a doctorate degree in natural sciences. She wrote her dissertation on the topic of "the development of the temperature concept" within the history of physics.[126]
1910s
1911: Polish-born physicist and chemist
Marie Curie became the first woman to receive the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which she received "[for] the discovery of the elements
radium and
polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element".[151][152][153] This made her the first person ever to win the Nobel Prize twice. As of 2022, she is the only woman to win it twice and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields.
1912: American astronomer
Henrietta Swan Leavitt studied the bright-dim cycle periods of Cepheid stars, then found a way to calculate the distance from such stars to Earth.[151]
1912: Canadian botanist and geneticist
Carrie Derick was appointed a professor of morphological botany at
McGill University. She was the first woman to become a full professor in any department at a Canadian university.[155]
1913:
Regina Fleszarowa became the first Polish woman to receive a PhD in natural sciences.[156]
1913:
Izabela Textorisová, the first Slovakian female botanist, published "Flora Data from the County of Turiec" in the journal Botanikai Közlemények. Her work uncovered more than 100 previously unknown species of plants from the
Turiec area.[157]
1914–1918: During World War I, a team of seven British women chemists conducted pioneering research on chemical antidotes and weaponized gases. The project leader,
Martha Whiteley, was awarded the
Order of the British Empire for her wartime contributions.[159]
1914-1918: Dame
Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, GBE (née Fraser) was a prominent English
botanist and
mycologist. For her wartime service she was the first woman to be awarded a military
DBE in January 1918. She served as Commandant of the
Women's Royal Air Force (WRAF) from September 1918 until December 1919.[160]
1914: British-born mycologist
Ethel Doidge became the first woman in South Africa to receive a doctorate in any subject, receiving her
doctorate of science degree from the University of the Good Hope. She wrote her thesis on "A bacterial disease of mango".[161]
1916:
Chika Kuroda became the first Japanese woman to earn a bachelor of science degree, studying chemistry at the
Tohoku Imperial University. After graduation, she was subsequently appointed an assistant professor at the university.[163]
1917: American
zoologistMary J. Rathbun received her PhD from the
George Washington University. Despite never having attended college – or any formal schooling beyond high school – Rathbun had authored more than 80 scientific publications, described over 674 new species of
crustacean, and developed a system for crustacean-related records at the
Smithsonian Museum.[164]
1919: Dutch biologist and geneticist
Jantina Tammes became the university professor in the
Netherlands. She was appointed an
extraordinary professor of
variability and heredity at the
University of Groningen. She became the first person in the Netherlands to occupy a chair in genetic. Moreover, she became the second female professor in the country, and the first one at the University of Groningen. She held this position until 1937, when she resigned at the age of sixty-six. [167]
1920:
Louisa Bolus was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of South Africa for her contributions to botany. Over the course of her lifetime, Bolus identified and named more than 1,700 new South African plant species – more species than any other botanist in South Africa.[169]
1923:
María Teresa Ferrari, an Argentine physician, earned the first diploma awarded to a woman by the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris for her studies of the
urinary tract.[170]
1925: Mexican-American botanist
Ynes Mexia embarked on her first botanical expedition into Mexico, collecting over 1500 plant specimens. Over the course of the next thirteen years, Mexia collected more than 145,000 specimens from Mexico, Alaska, and multiple South American countries. She discovered 500 new species.[171]
1925: British-American astronomer and astrophysicist
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin established that
hydrogen is the most common element in stars, and thus the most abundant element in the universe.[173]
1932:
Michiyo Tsujimura became the first Japanese woman to earn a
doctorate in agriculture. She studied at the Tokyo Imperial University, and her doctoral thesis was entitled "On the Chemical Components of Green Tea".[183]
1933: American bacteriologist
Ruth Ella Moore became the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in the natural sciences, completing her doctorate in bacteriology at
Ohio State University.[186]
1939: Austrian-Swedish physicist
Lise Meitner, along with
Otto Hahn, led the small group of scientists who first discovered
nuclear fission of uranium when it absorbed an extra
neutron; the results were published in early 1939.[203][204]
1940: Turkish
Archaeologist,
Sumerologist,
Assyriologist, and writer
Muazzez İlmiye Çığ. Upon receiving her degree in 1940, she began a multi-decade career at Museum of the Ancient Orient, one of three such institutions comprising
Istanbul Archaeology Museums, as a resident specialist in the field of
cuneiformtablets, thousands of which were being stored untranslated and unclassified in the facility's archives. In the intervening years, due to her efforts in the deciphering and publication of the tablets, the Museum became a
Middle Eastern languages learning center attended by ancient history researchers from every part of the world.[206]
1941: American scientist
Ruth Smith Lloyd became the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in anatomy.[207]
1942: Native American aerospace engineer
Mary Golda Ross became employed at
Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, where she provided troubleshooting for military aircraft. She went on to work for
NASA, developing operational requirements, flight plans, and a Planetary Flight Handbook for spacecraft missions such as the
Apollo program.[210]
1943: British geologist
Eileen Guppy was promoted to the rank of assistant geologist, therefore becoming the first female geology graduate appointed to the scientific staff of the
British Geological Survey.[211]
1947: American biochemist
Marie Maynard Daly became the first African-American woman to complete a PhD in chemistry in the United States. She completed her dissertation, entitled "A Study of the Products Formed by the Action of Pancreatic Amylase on Corn Starch" at
Columbia University.[218]
1947:
Berta Karlik, an Austrian physicist, was awarded the
Haitinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for her discovery of astatine.[219]
1948: American limnologist
Ruth Patrick of the
Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia led a multidisciplinary team of scientists on an extensive pollution survey of the Conestoga River watershed in Pennsylvania.[221] Patrick would become a leading authority on the ecological effects of river pollution, receiving the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 1975.[222]
1949: Botanist
Valida Tutayug [
az] became the first Azerbaijani woman to receive a PhD in biological studies. She went on to write the first national Azerbaijani-language textbooks on botany and biology.[223]
1950s: Chinese-American medical scientist
Tsai-Fan Yu co-founded a clinic at
Mount Sinai Medical Center for the study and treatment of
gout. Working with
Alexander B. Gutman, Yu established that levels of
uric acid were a factor in the pain experienced by gout patients, and subsequently developed multiple effective drugs for the treatment of gout.[228]
1952: American computer scientist
Grace Hopper completed what is considered to be the first compiler, a program that allows a computer user to use a human-readable
high-level programming language instead of machine code. It was known as the A-0 compiler.[239]
1955: Japanese geochemist
Katsuko Saruhashi published her research on measuring
carbonic acid levels in seawater. The paper included "Saruhashi's Table", a tool of measurement she had developed that focused on using water temperature, pH level, and chlorinity to determine carbonic acid levels. Her work contributed to global understanding of climate change, and Saruhashi's Table was used by oceanographers for the next 30 years.[253]
1955–1956: Soviet marine biologist
Maria Klenova became the first female scientist to work in the Antarctic, conducting research and assisting in the establishment of the
Mirny Antarctic station.[254]
1956: Canadian zoologist and feminist
Anne Innis Dagg began pioneering behavioural research on wild giraffes in South Africa in Kruger National Park. She researched and published on feminism and anti-nepotism laws at academic institutions in North America.
1956: Chinese-American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu conducted a
nuclear physics experiment in collaboration with the Low Temperature Group of the US
National Bureau of Standards. It was an important foundation for the
Standard Model in
particle physics and brought the first answer to the question of the universe's existence by virtue of
matter's predominance over antimatter.[255] The experiment, becoming known as the
Wu experiment, showed that parity could be violated in weak interaction.[256] The Nobel Prize was given only to her male colleagues soon after the headlines of the discovery were released.
1959: Chinese astronomer
Ye Shuhua led the development of the Joint Chinese Universal Time System, which became the Chinese national standard for measuring
universal time.[260]
1960: British
primatologistJane Goodall began studying chimpanzees in Tanzania; her study of them continued for over 50 years. Her observations challenged previous ideas that only humans made tools and that chimpanzees had a basically vegetarian diet.[263][264]
1964: American mathematician
Irene Stegun completed the work which led to the publication of
Handbook of Mathematical Functions, a widely used and widely cited reference work in applied mathematics.
1965: Sister
Mary Kenneth Keller became the first American woman to receive a Ph.D. in computer science.[277] Her thesis was titled "Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns".[278]
1967: South African radiobiologist
Tikvah Alper discovered that
scrapie, an infectious brain disease affecting sheep, did not spread via DNA or RNA like a viral or bacterial disease. The discovery enabled scientists to better understand diseases caused by
prions.[281][282]
1967:
Yvonne Brill, a Canadian-American rocket and jet propulsion engineer, invented the
hydrazineresistojet propulsion system.
1970: Polish geologist
Franciszka Szymakowska became widely known because of her unique and detailed geological drawings that are still used today.[287]
1973: American physicist
Anna Coble became the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in biophysics, completing her dissertation at
University of Illinois.[288]
1976: Filipino-American microbiologist
Roseli Ocampo-Friedmann traveled to the
Antarctic with
Imre Friedmann and discovered micro-organisms living within the porous rock of the Ross Desert. These organisms –
cryptoendoliths – were observed surviving extremely low temperatures and humidity, assisting scientific research into the possibility of life on
Mars.[294]
1977: Friederike Victoria
Joy Adamson (née Gessner, 20 January 1910 – 3 January 1980) was a naturalist, artist and author. Her book, Born Free, an international bestseller, describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa. It was made into an
Academy Award-winning
movie of the same name. In 1977, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art.[298]
1977: Argentine-Canadian scientist
Veronica Dahl became the first graduate at Université d'Aix-Marseille II (and one of the first women in the world) to earn a PhD in
artificial intelligence.[300]
1977: Canadian-American
Elizabeth Stern published her research on the link between
birth control pills – which contained high levels of
estrogen at the time – and the increased risk of
cervical cancer development in women. Her data helped pressure the pharmaceutical industry into providing safer contraceptive pills with lower hormone doses.[301]
1980: Nigerian geophysicist
Deborah Ajakaiye became the first woman in any West African country to be appointed a full professor of physics.[307][308] Over the course of her scientific career, she became the first female Fellow elected to the
Nigerian Academy of Science, and the first female dean of science in Nigeria.[309]
1985: After identifying
HIV as the cause of
AIDS, Chinese-American virologist
Flossie Wong-Staal became the first scientist to clone and genetically map the HIV virus, enabling the development of the first HIV blood screening tests.[322]
1988: American scientist and inventor
Patricia Bath (born 1942) became the first African-American to patent a medical device, namely the Laserphaco Probe for improving the use of lasers to remove cataracts.[325]
1992:
Mae Carol Jemison is an American engineer, physician, and former NASA astronaut. She became the first black woman to travel into space when she served as a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Jemison joined NASA's astronaut corps in 1987 and was selected to serve for the STS-47 mission, during which she orbited the Earth for nearly eight days on September 12–20, 1992.[329]
1992:
Edith M. Flanigen became the first woman awarded the
Perkin Medal (widely considered the highest honor in American industrial chemistry) for her outstanding achievements in applied chemistry.[330][331] The medal especially recognized her syntheses of aluminophosphate and silicoaluminophosphate molecular sieves as new classes of materials.[331]
1995: British geomorphologist
Marjorie Sweeting published the first comprehensive Western account of China's
karst, entitled Karst in China: its Geomorphology and Environment.[333][334]
1996: American planetary scientist
Margaret G. Kivelson led a team that discovered the first subsurface, saltwater ocean on an alien world, on the Jovian moon
Europa.[338][339]
1997: Lithuanian-Canadian primatologist
Birutė Galdikas received the
Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement for her research and rehabilitation work with orangutans. Her work with orangutans, eventually spanning over 30 years, was later recognized in 2014 as one of the longest continuous scientific studies of wild animals in history.[340]
2000: Venezuelan astrophysicist
Kathy Vivas presented her discovery of approximately 100 "new and very distant"
RR Lyrae stars, providing insight into the structure and history of the Milky Way galaxy.[346]
2003: American geophysicist
Claudia Alexander oversaw the final stages of
Project Galileo, a space exploration mission that ended at the planet Jupiter.[347]
2006: Chinese-American biochemist
Yizhi Jane Tao led a team of researchers to become the first to map the atomic structure of
Influenza A, contributing to
antiviral research.[350][351]
2006:
Merieme Chadid became the first Moroccan person and the first female astronomer to travel to Antarctica, leading an international team of scientists in the installation of a major
observatory in the South Pole.[353]
2006: American computer scientist
Frances E. Allen won the
Turing Award for "pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution". She was the first woman to win the award.[354]
2007: Using satellite imagery, Egyptian geomorphologist
Eman Ghoneim discovered traces of an 11,000-year-old mega lake in the
Sahara Desert. The discovery shed light on the origins of the largest modern
groundwater reservoir in the world.[356]
2008: American-born Australian
Penny Sackett became Australia's first female Chief Scientist.[359]
2008: American computer scientist
Barbara Liskov won the
Turing Award for "contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing".[360]
2009: Chinese geneticist
Zeng Fanyi and her research team published their experiment results proving that
induced pluripotent stem cells can be used to generate whole mammalian bodies – in this case, live mice.[363]
2010s
2010:
Marcia McNutt became the first female director of the United States Geological Survey.[364]
2011: Kazakhstani neuroscience student and computer hacker
Alexandra Elbakyan launched
Sci-Hub, a website that provides users with pirated copies of scholarly scientific papers. Within five years, Sci-Hub grew to contain 60 million papers and recorded over 42 million annual downloads by users. Elbakyan was finally sued by major academic publishing company
Elsevier, and Sci-Hub was subsequently taken down, but it reappeared under different domain names.[365]
2011: Taiwanese-American astrophysicist
Chung-Pei Ma led a team of scientists in discovering two of the largest
black holes ever observed.[366]
2015:
Asha de Vos became the first Sri Lankan person to receive a PhD in marine mammal research, completing her thesis on "Factors influencing blue whale aggregations off southern Sri Lanka" at the
University of Western Australia.[377][378]
2018: British astrophysicists
Hiranya Peiris and
Joanna Dunkley and Italian cosmologist
Licia Verde were among 27 scientists awarded the
Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their contributions to "detailed maps of the early universe that greatly improved our knowledge of the evolution of the cosmos and the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies".[380]
2018: British astrophysicist
Jocelyn Bell Burnell received the special
Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her scientific achievements and "inspiring leadership", worth $3 million. She donated the entirety of the prize money towards the creation of scholarships to assist women, underrepresented minorities and refugees who are pursuing the study of physics.[381]
2019: Imaging scientist
Katie Bouman developed an algorithm that made the first visualization of a black hole possible using the
Event Horizon Telescope. She was part of the team of over 200 people who implemented the project.[388][389][390][391]
2023: Australian geomicrobiologist
Jillian Banfield became the first female recipient of the van
Leeuwenhoek Medal, which she received for her studies of complex microbial communities and their interaction with the environment.[399]
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