60 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: she shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, then won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry 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 in the 2016 film Hidden Figures, with Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan; the film earned three Oscar nominations including Best Picture.

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.

Franklin earned her 1945 PhD for research on which material?

Her wartime work at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association led to the doctorate in 1945.

Grace Hopper was central to creating which English-based programming language in 1959?

COBOL: the 1959 CODASYL committee built it largely on Hopper's FLOW-MATIC, the English-like business language she had developed for UNIVAC, earning her the nickname 'Grandma COBOL'.

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 the insect into the Mark II logbook with the note 'First actual case of bug being found'; the page is held by the Smithsonian.

What rank did Grace Hopper reach in the US Navy?

Rear admiral: promoted to commodore by special presidential appointment in her seventies, she held that one-star rank when it was renamed rear admiral (lower half) in 1985, retiring in 1986 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 aboard which shuttle in 1992?

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 by 1951 that maize genetic elements could move between chromosomes, altering kernel colour patterns; scepticism led her to stop publishing the data in 1953.

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 the Gottingen faculty blocked her habilitation, so her courses were advertised as Hilbert's with Noether as 'assistant'; she had already spent seven unpaid years at Erlangen.

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 Columbia's Substitute Alloy Materials laboratory in 1944, improving gaseous-diffusion separation of uranium isotopes; colleagues nicknamed her 'the First Lady of Physics'.

In which national park did Jane Goodall study chimpanzees for more than 60 years?

Gombe Stream, Tanzania: Goodall arrived at the reserve on Lake Tanganyika in July 1960, sponsored by palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey, and the chimpanzee study she founded there ran for more than six decades.

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

Jubilee: the stuffed chimpanzee, named after the first chimp born at London Zoo, was given to her by her father when she was a toddler; her mother's friends warned it would frighten her.

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

Dark matter: Rubin and Kent Ford found in the 1970s 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 July 1938 to which country?

The Netherlands: Dutch physicist Dirk Coster escorted her by train across the border on 13 July 1938, after which she moved on to Stockholm's Nobel Institute for Physics in Sweden.

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

Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian-born Stanford professor, won the 2014 Fields Medal for work on the geometry of Riemann surfaces and moduli spaces; she died of breast cancer three years later, in 2017.

Who was the first woman in space?

Valentina Tereshkova flew aboard Vostok 6 in June 1963, spending almost three days in orbit as the first woman in space, selected from a pool of amateur parachutists.

What was the first woman in space's job before she was selected as a cosmonaut?

Textile factory worker: Tereshkova was working at the Krasny Perekop cotton mill in Yaroslavl when selected in 1962; her amateur parachuting was what qualified her.

How many times did Tereshkova orbit the Earth on Vostok 6?

48: Vostok 6 circled the Earth 48 times in just under three days, 16 to 19 June 1963, when Tereshkova was 26.

Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in which year?

1983: Ride flew on Challenger's STS-7 mission in June 1983, the third woman in space after two Soviet cosmonauts and, at 32, the youngest American astronaut to fly at that time.

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

English literature: Ride graduated from Stanford in 1973 with a BA in English literature alongside a BS in physics, and had also been a nationally ranked junior tennis player.

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

Pulsars: in 1967 Bell Burnell noticed a regular 1.3-second radio pulse in her chart recordings, the first pulsar; the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics went to her supervisor Antony Hewish instead.

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

Set up a fund for female, minority and refugee physics students: she gave the whole 2018 Breakthrough Prize to the Institute of Physics to create the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund for under-represented PhD students.

Dorothy Hodgkin won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping the structure of which molecule?

Vitamin B12: Hodgkin solved its complex structure by X-ray crystallography in the mid-1950s, the achievement cited for her 1964 prize; she had earlier proved penicillin contains a beta-lactam ring.

Rachel Carson's 1962 book that launched the modern environmental movement was called what?

Silent Spring, published in September 1962, documented the effects of synthetic pesticides such as DDT on birds and ecosystems, and helped bring about the 1972 US ban on DDT.

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

Malaria: Tu isolated artemisinin from sweet wormwood, a plant used in traditional Chinese medicine, in 1972 during the secret Project 523; she was China's first female Nobel laureate.

Margaret Hamilton led development of the on-board flight software for which program?

Apollo: Hamilton directed the team at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory that wrote the Apollo Guidance Computer software; its priority-scheduling design let the Apollo 11 computer ride out overload alarms during the 1969 landing.

Which term is Margaret Hamilton credited with coining?

Software engineering: Hamilton began using the term in the 1960s at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory to insist that software deserved the same rigour as hardware engineering; she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

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, enabling the COVID-19 vaccines; they shared the 2023 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine.

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

AZT: after Elion's retirement, her former Burroughs Wellcome team applied her rational drug-design methods to develop zidovudine, approved in 1987 as the first AIDS treatment; she shared the 1988 Nobel with George Hitchings and James Black.

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

Elizabeth Blackwell graduated top of her class from Geneva Medical College in New York in January 1849 and in 1859 became the first woman on Britain's Medical Register.

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: Arnold's Caltech lab from 1993 mimicked natural selection in test tubes, mutating and screening enzymes over generations to create catalysts for fuels and drugs; she shared the 2018 prize with George Smith and Gregory Winter.

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

Chirped pulse amplification for lasers: Strickland and Gerard Mourou stretched, amplified and recompressed pulses to reach extreme intensities, work published in 1985; she was only the third woman to win the physics prize, after Curie and Maria Goeppert Mayer.

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

A supermassive black hole: Ghez's team tracked stars orbiting Sagittarius A* with the Keck telescopes for decades, showing about four million solar masses packed into a tiny region; she shared the prize with Reinhard Genzel.

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.

In what year did Marie Curie become the first female professor at the University of Paris?

1906: after Pierre Curie was killed by a horse-drawn wagon in April 1906, the Sorbonne gave her his chair, and she delivered her first lecture that November as the university's first female professor.

Which university gave Jane Goodall a PhD in ethology in 1965 despite her lacking a bachelor's?

Cambridge admitted her to doctoral study in 1962 on Louis Leakey's recommendation, with no first degree, and awarded her the PhD in ethology in 1965 for her thesis on free-living chimpanzee behaviour.

How many honorary degrees did Grace Hopper receive in her lifetime?

40: Hopper collected 40 honorary degrees from universities around the world during her lifetime; a Navy destroyer, a Cray supercomputer and an Nvidia GPU architecture are also named for her.

Mary Anning found the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton at what age?

Twelve: in 1811 her brother Joseph found the skull, and Mary, aged twelve, unearthed the rest of the ichthyosaur skeleton the following year at Lyme Regis, Dorset; as a woman she could not join the Geological Society.

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

Hydrogen and helium: her 1925 Radcliffe thesis applied Saha's ionisation theory to stellar spectra, showing stars are overwhelmingly hydrogen; Henry Norris Russell persuaded her to call the result spurious, then confirmed it in 1929.

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 first woman paid a salary as a scientist, was best known for discovering what?

Comets: Herschel discovered eight comets between 1786 and 1797, including the periodic 35P/Herschel-Rigollet, and received the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal in 1828.

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

Marie Tharp plotted sonar soundings by hand at Columbia's Lamont observatory in the 1950s and spotted the rift valley running down the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, evidence that helped win acceptance for seafloor spreading and plate tectonics.

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

Nuclear shell structure: Goeppert Mayer explained the 'magic numbers' of especially stable nuclei with a shell model including spin-orbit coupling, sharing the 1963 prize with J. Hans D. Jensen; she was only the second woman to win the physics Nobel.

Which US president awarded Katherine Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015?

Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on 24 November 2015, when she was 97; over a 33-year NASA career she calculated trajectories for Project Mercury and rendezvous paths for the lunar module.

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

Mary Jackson joined Langley's segregated West Area Computing unit in 1951, petitioned to attend whites-only night classes, and became NASA's first Black female engineer in 1958; in 1979 she took a demotion to run NASA's Federal Women's Program.