...but can we do it without suggesting that the reason a woman would dedicate her life to #science & #teaching was to fill the vacuous space of never having children?
...and maybe also without suggesting some intuitive maternal instinct as the source of her #scientific reasoning?
Margaret Bryan (1759-1836(?)) was an English natural philosopher and educator, and the author of standard scientific textbooks.
Her first known work was Compendious System of Astronomy (1797), collecting her lectures on astronomy. She later published Lectures on Natural Philosophy (1806), a textbook on the fundamentals of physics and astronomy, and an Astronomical and Geographical Class Book for Schools, a thin octavo, in 1815. via @wikipedia
Il y a 122 ans mourrait Clémence Royer (1830-1902). Si elle est surtout connue pour sa traduction (parfois très personnelle) de L'Origine des espèce de Charles Darwin, elle s'est intéressée à de nombreux sujets comme les savant·es des Lumières. Mais elle fait figure d'exception dans la 2e moitié du 19e siècles où les scientifiques sont des spécialistes d'un domaine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBPWXgo5q8E #womeninscience#femmesenscience#onthisday#otd
Me: Gets PhD in animal behaviour and studies animal behaviour for 20-odd years
Random man: "I, too, have looked at an animal once in my life, I will now e-mail this woman to tell her about animal behaviour that she probably has never seen as fully and expertly I have"
I love researching historical documents at work. It’s easy to forget that this was the norm, and it really puts it into perspective to see it turn up unexpectedly in writing.
“Nominations and Correspondence for the American Men of Science 1970-1971
Prominent engineers, biologists, doctors and other scientists were included in the 1970 call for nominations.”
Maria Cunitz (1610 – 22 August 1664) was an Silesian astronomer, and the most notable female astronomer of the early modern era. She authored a book "Urania propitia", in which she provided new tables, new ephemera, and a simpler working solution to Kepler's second law for determining the position of a planet on its elliptical path. The Cunitz crater on Venus is named after her. The minor planet 12624 Mariacunitia is named in her honour. via @wikipedia
American astronomer Margaret Mayall was born #OTD in 1902.
She is best remembered for her revising of Thomas William Webb’s ‘Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes’ (which originally appeared in 1859) prior to its republication by Dover Publications in 1962. The minor planet 3342 Fivesparks, discovered on 27 Jan 1982 from Oak Ridge Observatory at Harvard, was named in honour of Margaret Walton Mayall and her husband Robert Newall Mayall. via Soc.Hist. of Astronomy
Vera Rubin will help us find the weird and wonderful things happening in the solar system.
by Evan Gough
The Vera Rubin Observatory is something special among telescopes. It's built around a massive digital camera and will repeatedly capture broad, deep views of the entire sky rather than focus on any individual objects. via @physorg_com
#OTD in 1911 the French Academy of Sciences rejected the membership application of Marie Curie.
In 1910 Curie succeeded in isolating radium; she also defined an international standard for radioactive emissions that was eventually named for her and Pierre (the Ci). Nevertheless, in 1911 the French Academy of Sciences failed, by 1 or 2 votes, to elect her to membership in the academy. Elected instead was Édouard Branly. via @Wikipedia
During the French Academy of Sciences elections, she was vilified by the right-wing press as a foreigner and atheist. Her daughter later remarked on the French press's hypocrisy in portraying Curie as an unworthy foreigner when she was nominated for a French honour, but portraying her as a French heroine when she received foreign honours such as her Nobel Prizes. via @wikipedia
Thanks to Fulya Gökalp, we can already announce meeting no.5, where chapter 9 of “Building reproducible analytical pipelines with R” by Bruno Rodrigues will be presented.
American astronomer Mary Watson Whitney died #OTD in 1921.
She was the head of the Vassar College Observatory for 22 years. Whitney focused her teaching and research (after Mitchell's retirement in 1888) on subjects related to double stars, variable stars, asteroids, comets, and measurements by photographic plates. Whitney was a fellow of the AAAS and a charter member of the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society. via @wikipedia
A guided tour of selected luminaries of astronomy, from Ancient Greece to today.
By: Sidney Perkowitz
Women astronomers remain a minority and often encounter a lack of recognition, unwelcoming career paths, and harassment. But today women participate and publish in astronomy and astrophysics at higher rates than in physics overall, producing world-class research. via @JSTOR_Daily
Polish astronomer Elisabeth Catherina Koopmann-Hevelius was born #OTD in 1647.
She was the wife and assistant of the renowned German astronomer and instrument maker Johannes Hevelius. Following the death of her husband in 1687, Catherina Elisabetha was responsible for editing many of his unpublished writings including Stellarum Fixarum (1687); Firmamentum Sobiescianum sive Uranographia (1690); and Prodromus Astronomiae (1690). via @wikipedia
Sofya Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya mathematician and writer who made a valuable contribution to the theory of partial differential equations was born #OTD in 1850.
In 1874 she presented three papers—on partial differential equations, on Saturn’s rings, and on elliptic integrals—to the University of Göttingen as her doctoral dissertation and was awarded the degree, summa cum laude, in absentia. via @wikipedia
Sofya Kovalevskaya's paper on partial differential equations, the most important of the three papers, won her valuable recognition within the European mathematical community. It contains what is now commonly known as the Cauchy-Kovalevskaya theorem, which gives conditions for the existence of solutions to a certain class of partial differential equations. In 1884 she joined the editorial board of the mathematical journal Acta Mathematica.
Uncovering the Forgotten Female Astronomers of Yerkes Observatory
It all started with a photo of Einstein.
In the first half of the 20th century, Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin employed more than 100 women, many who were astronomers. But their names have all been lost to time—until now. via @atlasobscura
German astronomer Caroline Herschel died #OTD in 1848.
She was the sister of William Herschel, and seemingly destined to live in her brother’s shadow. However, she became the first professional female astronomer and made a name for herself through a significant number of contributions to astronomy, including the discovery of 8 comets, one of which was the periodic comet 35P/Herschel–Rigollet which she 1st saw as a magnitude 7.5 object a little to the south of the star Sheliak on 21 Dec 1788.
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Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian Maria Gaetana Agnesi died #OTD in 1799.
She was the first woman to write a mathematics handbook. The most valuable result of her works was the Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventù italiana (1748) and "was regarded as the best introduction extant to the works of Euler". The goal of this work was to give a systematic illustration of the different results and theorems of infinitesimal calculus.