| inbluevt | Date: Wednesday, 2013/10/16, 5:10 AM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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From computer programming to nuclear fission to the paper bag machine, it's time to stop erasing these women from their great works.
October 15 is Ada Lovelace Day, named for the world's first computer programmer and dedicated to promoting women in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math. A Victorian-era mathematical genius, Lovelace was the first to describe how computing machines could solve math problems, write new forms of music, and much more, if you gave them instructions in a language they could understand. Of course, over the ensuing 100-plus years, dudes have been lining up to push her out of the picture (more on that below).
Lovelace is hardly the only woman to be erased from the history of her own work. Here's a quick look at eight women whose breakthroughs were marginalized by their peers.
(This isn't a complete list, by tragically epic degrees. Please use the comments section to rail about everyone we missed.)
Rosalind Franklin, discovery of the DNA double helix: Watson and Crick's famed article in Nature on the discovery of the DNA double-helix structure, which would win them a Nobel Prize, buries a mention of Rosalind Franklin's role in the footnotes. But Franklin, a British biophysicist who had honed a technique to closely observe molecules using X-ray diffraction, was the first to capture a photographic image of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, known as Photo 51. An estranged male colleague of Franklin's at King's College showed her photograph to competitors Watson and Crick, without her permission. Photo 51 became crucial in shaping their thesis, but it would take Watson 40 years to admit this publicly. Franklin, known as the "dark lady of DNA," shifted her focus to the study of RNA, and made important strides before her death from cancer in 1958, four years before Watson and Crick received the Nobel.
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Rosalind Franklin Wikimedia Commons
Message edited by inbluevt - Wednesday, 2013/10/16, 5:12 AM |
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