Who are or were some women in the STEM fields to whom you'd like to give recognition?

I was chatting with cazzie and JoyousLove.

I was trying to name some women scientists, but I could only remember two. I think caz and Joy named about 5–10 each, so I’d like to learn about some more.

Now that I think of it, I know of a math babe, a current Jeopardy champ who’s a microbiologist, and an actor who I think also has a degree in microbio.

Also, if there are any jellies whom you’d like to mention, please list them in a separate post, because they might be moderated.

How about Judith Resnick, the first Jewish person in space?

The microbiologist and Jeopardy champ is Lisa Schlitt. :-)

@AnonymousAccount8

Excellent!

The categorical details are not to be considered as limitations.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. You may have seen this meme about her floating around. Turns out she was allowed to study astronomy and astrophysics at Cambridge and wrote a dissertation about the composition of stars, but was denied a degree because she was a woman. She later got her PhD at Radcliffe and started working at the Harvard College Observatory (which was already somewhat friendly to female astronomers, but became even more so during her tenure).

Lisa works for the FBI and Dept of State doing research on rare and emerging pathogens.

Limor Fried “is an American electrical engineer and owner of the electronics hobbyist company Adafruit Industries. She is influential in the open-source hardware community, having participated in the first Open Source Hardware Summit and the drafting of the Open Source Hardware definition, and is known for her moniker ladyada, an homage to Lady Ada Lovelace.”

Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Murray Hopper was one of the first computer programmers on Earth.

Per Wikipedia, Admiral Hopper “invented the first compiler for a computer programming language. She popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages.”

Shakuntala Devi

She was amazing at mental computations.

There is a feature film in theaters today about women in science – Hidden Figures

The incredible untold story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson – brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, a stunning achievement that restored the nation’s confidence, turned around the Space Race, and galvanized the world. The visionary trio crossed all gender and race lines to inspire generations to dream big.

10 female astronomers everyone should know

These Women Should Win a Nobel Prize in Physics

Contributions of 20th century women to physics

Margaret Heafield Hamilton is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program.

I could go on all day. I’m just a high school graduate, but I can find endless examples of women leading in science.

I was raised right.
Mom was a feminist before the word was known.
Dad supported her 100%.

I would add Andrea Ghez to the list of astronomers everyone should know.

She and her team discovered Sagittarius A, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

I read that our solar system is about 25,000 light years from Sag A, and I’ve wondered what the minimum distance was for us to avoid falling into it.

She answers my question in part of the interview I linked to her name:

“Fortunately, most things around the supermassive black hole are just going to go around it. They’re going to orbit it. They don’t actually get sucked in. You have to be incredibly close to the black hole for it to fall into the black hole [roughly closer than the Earth is to the sun].”

^ As a child, my sister wrote a letter to Andrea Ghez after reading her children’s book, You can be a Woman Astronomer, and she wrote back. Always thought that was pretty neat of her.

There are a couple of giants in my field of computer science that I’d like to mention.

Grace Hopper is the reason we program computers using words instead of binary or something only slightly less nonsensical called assembly language (this is a really, really big deal). Oh, and if you’ve ever heard the term “bug” for a computer error, that was her too. The first computer “bug” was a literal moth inside a tower that caused something to short circuit. Every year now there is a conference in her name held for women in computer science. I attended in 2015 and it was life-changing.

Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, period. She was a friend of Charles Babbage’s, inventor of the difference engine and analytical engine. He never finished building an analytical engine, and in fact nobody has ever completely built an analytical engine due to the precision required. But the idea was that it was going to be programmable using punch cards, inspired by the Jacquard loom. And Ada wrote programs for it. She was incredibly visionary about the potential for computing, imagining things that we can do today that were far beyond the capability of the analytical engine. But of course, nowadays, there are people who try to frame her as having been half-mad or who try to attribute her work to Babbage. I highly recommend the biography Ada’s Algorithm.

Programming was, in fact, originally viewed as “women’s work” when it came about, as it was viewed as an extension of dictation. But in the 1980’s, somebody got ahold of the idea of marketing computers as machines to play games on, and the marketing was targeted towards boys. The field has been male-dominated ever since.

Mary Celine Fasenmyer, also known as Sister Celine, since she was a nun as well as a mathematician.

Emmy Noether, who among many other accomplishments, came up with a beautiful mind blowing discovery in physics. Every conservation law in physics corresponds to a symmetry in the laws of physics. A symmetry might for example be that the laws of physics remain the same if you rotate your field of vision. Don’t ask me about this, because I have no idea how the correspondences are determined.

I hear that Fredericka Douglass is doing more and more things and getting more and more recognization.

Yes, she’s done a lot more good posthumously, than Donna Trump ever would in a yuge number of lifetimes.

@janbb “recognization”

Yes, I heard they’re teaching about her now as part of the standard elementary school edumacation.

Radia Perlman, inventor of the spanning tree protocol. Without this we could not operate redundancy on network switches without having broadcast storms. It’s something important almost nobody knows about.

@ARE_you_kidding_me I went to high school with Radia Perlman. She was a friend and my lab partner in Honors Chem. She got me through it! A brilliant and lovely person.

Wow! Way cool!

Hedy lamarr, another less known contributor invented spread spectrum used in wireless communications. Interesting history of how that came about.

@ARE_you_kidding_me I didn’t know about Hedy Lamarr as a scientist until there was a Google doodle about her. I love that she did both!

I need to hear more from you about Radia

On the run right now but I can pm you later.

The physicist Mileva Marić.