58 Fun Facts About Women in STEM

Marie Curie is the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in which two different sciences?

Physics and chemistry: the 1903 physics committee at first meant to honour only Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, adding Marie after Pierre asked to be considered with her; in 1911 she won the chemistry prize alone.

Which two elements did Marie Curie discover?

Radium and polonium: she and Pierre Curie announced polonium in July 1898, naming it for her native Poland, and radium in December 1898.

What word did Marie Curie coin for the phenomenon she studied?

Radioactivity: Marie Curie coined the term in 1898 while studying the rays uranium emits, proposing that the emission was a property of the atom itself.

What did Marie Curie organise for French field hospitals during World War I?

Mobile X-ray units: Curie fitted vans with radiography equipment, nicknamed 'petites Curies', and drove them to the front so surgeons could locate bullets and shrapnel in wounded soldiers.

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of which famous poet?

Lord Byron: the poet separated from Ada's mother Annabella weeks after her birth in December 1815 and left England for good; Annabella steered Ada toward mathematics.

Ada Lovelace's famous notes described a program for which proposed machine?

Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine: Lovelace translated Luigi Menabrea's 1842 paper on the proposed machine and added notes roughly three times longer than the original, including her famous Note G.

Which mathematical sequence did Ada Lovelace's Note G show how to compute?

Bernoulli numbers: Note G laid out a stepwise table for Babbage's proposed engine to calculate them, but the machine was never built, so the program never ran.

Which astronaut asked Katherine Johnson to recheck the computer's calculations before his 1962 orbital flight?

John Glenn: before his Friendship 7 flight in February 1962 he asked for Johnson to check the IBM computer's orbital figures by hand; she had earlier computed Alan Shepard's 1961 trajectory.

Which actress played Katherine Johnson in Hidden Figures?

Taraji P. Henson played Katherine Johnson, and at the 2017 Oscars she introduced the real Johnson, aged 98, who was wheeled on stage to a standing ovation.

Rosalind Franklin's most famous X-ray image of DNA is known as what?

Photo 51: the X-ray diffraction image of B-form DNA taken in May 1952 by her student Raymond Gosling, which Maurice Wilkins showed James Watson in early 1953 without her knowledge.

Rosalind Franklin earned her 1945 PhD for research on which material?

Coal: rather than take traditional war work in 1942, Franklin joined Britain's coal research association, where her study of coal's tiny pores helped predict how different coals would perform as fuel.

Grace Hopper's work laid the foundations for which English-based programming language, created in 1959?

COBOL: the 1959 committee that defined it, with Hopper as adviser, drew heavily on FLOW-MATIC, the English-word language she had built for UNIVAC because business users were not mathematicians.

What did Grace Hopper's team famously find stuck in a relay of the Harvard Mark II in 1947?

A moth: on 9 September 1947 operators taped it into the Mark II logbook as the 'first actual case of bug being found', a joke that worked because engineers had called faults bugs since the 1800s.

What rank did Grace Hopper reach in the US Navy?

Rear admiral: promoted to commodore at a White House ceremony in 1983, she became an admiral in 1985 only because the Navy renamed that one-star rank, and retired the next year aged 79.

Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr co-invented a frequency-hopping guidance system with which composer?

George Antheil: the avant-garde composer of Ballet Mecanique worked out the synchronised hopping mechanism with Lamarr, borrowing the idea of a player-piano roll; their patent was granted in August 1942.

Hedy Lamarr's frequency-hopping patent was intended to guide what?

Torpedoes: the 1942 'Secret Communication System' patent hopped a radio-guided torpedo's control signal across 88 frequencies so enemy ships could not jam it.

Mae Jemison became the first African-American woman in space in 1992 aboard which shuttle, then NASA's newest?

Endeavour: Jemison flew on STS-47 in September 1992 as a mission specialist; a trained physician, she had earlier served as a Peace Corps medical officer in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Jennifer Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with whom for CRISPR gene editing?

Emmanuelle Charpentier: the French microbiologist and Doudna published the 2012 Science paper showing CRISPR-Cas9 could be programmed to cut DNA at chosen sites, and shared the 2020 prize.

Barbara McClintock won the 1983 Nobel Prize for discovering what in maize?

Transposons, or 'jumping genes': McClintock showed that genetic elements in maize could move between chromosomes, changing kernel colour patterns; faced with scepticism, she stopped publishing the data in journals.

Emmy Noether's famous theorem links symmetry with what?

Conservation laws: Noether's 1918 theorem shows every continuous symmetry of a physical system yields a conserved quantity, so symmetry under time shifts gives conservation of energy.

How did Emmy Noether lecture at Gottingen when the faculty refused to appoint a woman?

Under David Hilbert's name: from 1915 her courses were advertised as his, with Noether listed as merely assisting; she was allowed to teach under her own name only in 1919, and still without pay.

Chien-Shiung Wu's famous experiment proved that what is not conserved?

Parity: Wu's 1956 cobalt-60 beta-decay experiment showed the weak interaction distinguishes left from right; Lee and Yang, who proposed the test, won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Chien-Shiung Wu worked on which wartime effort, separating uranium isotopes?

The Manhattan Project: Wu joined its Columbia laboratory in 1944 to work on gaseous diffusion, and when the new Hanford reactor kept shutting down, her earlier research helped pin the blame on xenon-135.

In which national park did Jane Goodall begin her landmark study of wild chimpanzees in 1960?

Gombe Stream, Tanzania: Goodall arrived in July 1960 and that year watched chimps feed grass stalks into termite mounds to fish out insects, upending the belief that only humans made tools.

What was the name of the toy chimpanzee Jane Goodall's father gave her as a child?

Jubilee: her father gave her the stuffed chimpanzee when she was a toddler; it became her favourite toy, and Goodall still had it more than 60 years later.

Vera Rubin's studies of galaxy rotation curves provided key evidence for what?

Dark matter: Rubin and Kent Ford found that stars at a galaxy's edge orbit as fast as those near its centre, implying unseen mass; the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is named for her.

Lise Meitner was instrumental in discovering nuclear fission but was left out of which honour?

The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went solely to Otto Hahn for discovering fission, although Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch had worked out the physics of what Hahn's experiments showed.

Lise Meitner fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and settled in which country?

Sweden: she was slipped across the Dutch border in July 1938 and went on to Stockholm; that Christmas she and her nephew Otto Frisch worked out that the uranium nucleus had split.

Who was the first woman to win the Fields Medal, in 2014?

Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian-born Stanford professor, worked by doodling on huge sheets of paper, which her young daughter called painting; she died of breast cancer in 2017, aged 40.

Who was the first woman in space?

Valentina Tereshkova spent almost three days in orbit on Vostok 6 in June 1963; her hobby of skydiving at a local flying club helped make her one of five women picked from some 400 candidates.

What was the day job of the first woman in space when chosen as a cosmonaut in 1962?

Textile factory worker: she was working at a mill in Yaroslavl and skydiving at a local club when chosen in 1962, and became an air force officer only after finishing cosmonaut training.

The first woman in space logged more flight time than which entire US programme?

Mercury: her one flight lasted almost three days, longer than every Mercury astronaut's mission put together; the Soviet cosmonaut chief had pushed to fly a woman so that an American would not be first.

Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in June 1983 aboard which shuttle?

Challenger: Ride flew on its STS-7 mission at 32, then the youngest American in space; before the launch she was asked whether spaceflight would affect her ability to have children.

Besides physics, in what subject did Sally Ride earn a bachelor's degree at Stanford?

English literature: Ride took the BA alongside her physics BS in 1973, then answered a NASA call for astronauts that she spotted in the Stanford student newspaper in 1977.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered what as a PhD student in 1967?

Pulsars: in 1967 Bell Burnell spotted a faint repeating signal in her chart recordings, jokingly tagged LGM for little green men; the 1974 Nobel Prize for the discovery went to her supervisor Antony Hewish.

What did Jocelyn Bell Burnell do with her $3 million Breakthrough Prize in 2018?

Funded physics scholarships: she gave it all to the Institute of Physics to help women, ethnic-minority and refugee students become researchers, saying her own outsider's view had led to her discovery.

Dorothy Hodgkin won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry after mapping penicillin and which other molecule?

Vitamin B12: Hodgkin had its structure by 1956, the most complex of any vitamin, then pressed on with insulin, which she finally cracked in 1969, some 35 years after starting on it.

Which 1962 book by Rachel Carson is credited with launching the modern environmental movement?

Silent Spring documented how synthetic pesticides such as DDT harmed birds and ecosystems, and the outcry it stirred led to a US ban on DDT and helped bring about the Environmental Protection Agency.

Tu Youyou won the 2015 Nobel Prize for discovering a drug against which disease?

Malaria: when hot-water extracts of sweet wormwood gave erratic results, Tu went back to an ancient Chinese remedy text, switched to a low-temperature extraction, and isolated artemisinin.

Which term is Margaret Hamilton credited with coining?

Software engineering: Hamilton began using the term at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory in the 1960s so that software would be taken as seriously as hardware and other kinds of engineering.

Katalin Kariko's Nobel-winning work laid the groundwork for which medical technology?

mRNA vaccines: Kariko and Drew Weissman showed in 2005 that swapping in modified nucleosides such as pseudouridine stops synthetic mRNA triggering inflammation, the step that made COVID-19 vaccines possible.

Gertrude Elion's rational drug design led to which first widely used AIDS drug?

AZT: after Elion retired in 1983, her former Burroughs Wellcome colleagues used her rational drug-design approach to develop it; she shared the 1988 Nobel Prize with George Hitchings and James Black.

Who was the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, in 1849?

Elizabeth Blackwell got into Geneva Medical College in New York only because its male students, treating her application as a joke, voted to admit her; she graduated first in her class in 1849.

Hypatia, the first female mathematician whose life is well recorded, taught in which ancient city?

Alexandria: Hypatia, daughter of the mathematician Theon of Alexandria, taught philosophy and astronomy there until a Christian mob murdered her in 415 AD.

Frances Arnold won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering what technique?

Directed evolution of enzymes: from 1993 Arnold's Caltech lab mimicked natural selection in the test tube, mutating enzymes and keeping the best performers, a method now used to make biofuels and medicines.

Donna Strickland's 2018 physics Nobel recognised her work on what?

Chirped pulse amplification for lasers: Strickland and Gerard Mourou stretched a pulse, amplified it and squeezed it back; the method, from her doctoral work, now powers millions of laser eye operations.

Andrea Ghez shared the 2020 physics Nobel for discovering what at the centre of the Milky Way?

A supermassive black hole: since the 1990s Ghez's team has tracked stars whipping around Sagittarius A*, showing some four million solar masses packed into a region no bigger than our solar system.

Rita Levi-Montalcini won the 1986 Nobel Prize for discovering what?

Nerve growth factor: Levi-Montalcini identified the protein in the 1950s through experiments on mouse tumours and chick embryos, sharing the 1986 prize with Stanley Cohen; the Italian neurobiologist lived to 103.

Marie Curie became the first female professor at which university?

University of Paris: after her husband Pierre was run over by a horse-drawn wagon on a rainy street in April 1906, the Sorbonne gave Marie his professorship.

Which university awarded Jane Goodall a PhD in ethology although she had no bachelor's degree?

Cambridge made her only the eighth person allowed to study for a PhD there without a first degree; her habit of naming chimps instead of numbering them broke with scientific convention.

Grace Hopper handed out foot-long pieces of wire to show how far a signal can travel in what span of time?

A nanosecond: each wire, just under a foot long, marked the farthest a signal can travel in a billionth of a second; Hopper set it against a coil nearly a thousand feet long for a microsecond.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's 1925 thesis showed stars are made mostly of which two elements?

Hydrogen and helium: her 1925 thesis read stellar spectra with Saha's new ionisation theory, but Henry Norris Russell opposed the result so strongly that she played it down; he later reached the same answer himself.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovered the period-luminosity relation for which kind of star?

Cepheid variables: from variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds, Leavitt found in 1912 that a Cepheid's brightness tracks its pulsation period, giving astronomers a standard candle for measuring distances to other galaxies.

Caroline Herschel, the world's first professional female astronomer, was best known for discovering what?

Comets: Herschel found eight between 1786 and 1797 while assisting her brother William, and King George III paid her £50 a year for the work, which is what made her a professional.

Which geologist mapped the Atlantic Ocean floor with Bruce Heezen, revealing a rift valley along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge?

Marie Tharp plotted sonar soundings by hand in the 1950s and spotted the rift; Heezen first dismissed it as 'girl talk', then earthquake data proved her right and helped win acceptance for continental drift.

Maria Goeppert Mayer shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries concerning what?

Nuclear shell structure: Goeppert Mayer explained why nuclei with 'magic numbers' of protons or neutrons are so stable, after years when no university would hire her because her husband was a professor.

Which US president awarded Katherine Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom?

Barack Obama presented the medal in 2015, when Johnson was 97; she had joined Langley's segregated pool of human 'computers' in 1953 and stayed with NASA until 1986.

In 1958, who became NASA's first Black female engineer after taking engineering classes?

Mary Jackson needed the City of Hampton's permission to attend whites-only night classes, became NASA's first Black female engineer in 1958, and in 1979 took a demotion to run Langley's Federal Women's Program.