Friday, March 30, 2012

Women's History Month | Roquia Sakhawat Hussain

"In the capital, where our Queen lives, there are two universities. One of these invented a wonderful balloon, to which they attached a number of pipes. By means of this captive balloon which they managed to keep afloat above the cloud-land, they could draw as much water from the atmosphere as they pleased."

-- from Sultana's Dream (1905), by Roquia Sakhawat Hussain

[This month, 13.7 Billion Years looked at female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today, in honor of Women's History Month. For the final post, a deviation from science to science fiction.]

Born in 1880 in Rangpur, Bengal, British India (now Bangladesh), Roquia Sakhawat Hussain was a writer, feminist and social worker who established the Sakhawat Memorial Girls' High School in Bhagalpur, the first school for Muslim girls, which continues today.

In 1905, her short story Sultana's Dream was published in The Indian Ladies' Magazine in Madras. Sultana's Dream is not only a Bengali sci-fi classic, but also one the earliest examples of feminist science fiction. The story depicts a feminist utopian society in which traditional male and female roles are reversed. The kingdom is ruled by a Queen who "liked science very much" and "circulated an order that all the women in her country should be educated."

Unlike traditional purdah, an Islamic custom that mandates women's bodies to be hidden from public view, men are the secluded sex while women run everything in a science-based, technologically advanced and crime-free society that has labor-free agriculture, flying cars, weather control and solar power. The word "sultana" is intended to be a female version of the traditional male ruler, the sultan.

Click here to read the full text of Sultana's Dream.

Click here to read a preview of the story in a book illustrated by Durga Bai, a contemporary female artist from the Gond tribe of central India, who drew her response to this century-old feminist fable.

ACTION ALERTS
  • Tell President Obama to protect roadless areas in America's national forests from expanded mining, new drilling and other industrial activities (Wilderness Society)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
PAST SERIES

image: Book cover of Sultana's Dream, illustrated by Durga Bai
No comments: Links to this post
Labels: , ,

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Women's History Month | Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

"The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience...The reward of the old scientist is the sense of having seen a vague sketch grow into a masterly landscape." -- Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, accepting the Henry Norris Russell Prize from the American Astronomical Society

[In honor of Women's History Month, 13.7 Billion Years remembers 22 female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today.]

In 1925, contradicting accepted wisdom of the time, English-American astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin proved that the Sun is mainly composed of hydrogen, a theory that is now one of the most fundamental in stellar astrophysics.

Born in 1900 in Wendover, England, Payne received a scholarship to read botany, physics and chemistry at Cambridge University, where, as a curious 19-year-old, she was turned onto the subject of astronomy by a lecture delivered by British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington. The lecture was about Eddington's expedition to Africa to photograph the stars near the eclipsed Sun in a test of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Though she finished her studies, she was not awarded a degree: At the time, Cambridge did not grant degrees to women (though she was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society while still she was still a student there). But she did get her degree after moving to the United States, becoming the first person to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, a women's college that is now part of Harvard University.

Her doctoral thesis, "Stellar Atmospheres, A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars," was described by astronomer Otto Struve as "undoubtedly the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy." The thesis established the fact that stars are composed mainly of hydrogen, a fact that we now take for granted. Asteroid 2039 Payne-Gaposchkin named after her.

ACTION ALERTS
  • Tell Congress to protect the rare birds and sea turtles of Cape Hatteras National Seashore from off-road vehicles, which destroy nesting sites and chicks in their wake (National Audubon Society)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
PAST SERIES

image: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (Portrait by Patricia Watwood, Harvard Portrait Collection)
No comments: Links to this post
Labels: , ,

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Women's History Month | Vera Rubin

Vera Rubin was the first female allowed to look at the stars through the telescope at Palomar Observatory. Thank heavens for small favors: She would go on to discover a key piece of evidence for the existence of dark matter

[In honor of Women's History Month, 13.7 Billion Years remembers 22 female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today.]

"Dark matter" is the term that physicists use to describe the hypothesized and currently unknown type of matter that is believed to account for a large part of the total mass of the Universe. And one of the best pieces of evidence we have thus far for the existence of dark matter comes from a discovery about the rotation of spiral galaxies made by American astronomer Vera Rubin.

Known as the galaxy rotation problem, the phenomenon describes the discrepancy between the predicted angular motion of galaxies and their observed motion. In our solar system, the further a planet is from the Sun, the slower it travels along its orbit. This fits squarely within the theory of gravity. Similarly, the stars in a spiral galaxy rotate around the center of that galaxy. So it had been expected that the stars further from the center would, like the planets around the Sun, move slower than those nearer to the center.

But what Rubin noticed was that when it comes to spiral galaxies, the speed of stars doesn't change, no matter how far they are from the galactic center. This observation suggests that there is some invisible matter exerting an additional gravitational pull on the more distant stars, causing them to move faster than we would expect them to. Thus, Rubin's discovery stands as the best evidence that "dark matter" does exist. Today, physicists believe that dark matter constitutes 83 percent of all the matter in the universe.

Born in 1928, Rubin was the first female allowed to observe at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego. Today, the 83-year-old astronomer is a researcher in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at Carnegie Institution of Washington. The co-author of over 100 peer-reviewed research papers and the author of Bright Galaxies Dark Matters, Rubin is also a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. She is also a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a scientific academy of the Vatican, founded in 1603 and re-established in 1936 by Pope Pius XI.

"In my own life, my science and my religion are separate," said Rubin in an interview with the National Catholic Register. "I'm Jewish, and so religion to me is a kind of moral code and a kind of history. I try to do my science in a moral way, and, I believe that, ideally, science should be looked upon as something that helps us understand our role in the universe."

ACTION ALERTS
PAST SERIES

image: Vera Rubin (source: American Institute of Physics, Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, (Wikimedia Commons)
No comments: Links to this post
Labels: , , , ,

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Women's History Month | Eugenie Clark

Follow your heart and take as much math as you can." -- Eugenie Clark

[In honor of Women's History Month, 13.7 Billion Years remembers 22 female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today.]

American ichthyologist Eugenie Clark, a.k.a. "The Shark Lady," has been swimming among sharks for more than three decades. Fearless, perhaps. But she has said that she's too fascinated by sharks to be afraid of them. She is a pioneer in the use of scuba diving for research.

Born in 1922, Clark, who has a Ph. D. in Zoology and is a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, has been on over 35 expeditions to study marine life, particularly sharks, around the world, including Australia, Japan, Papua New Guinea, Guam, the Solomon Islands, the Marshall Islands and the Red Sea. Her studies in Micronesia were the basis of her first book, Lady with a Spear (1953), a Book-of-the-Month selection that was translated in to several languages with several editions published.

Clark is a rare breed: In the late 1940s, there were few female biologists. In 1976, Clark was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1994, she received the Medal of Excellence by the American Society of Oceanographers. Several species of fish have been named in her honor, including Callogobius clarki (Goren), a kind of goby; Sticharium clarkae George, a kind of blennioid; Enneapterygius clarkae Holleman, a kind of triplefin; and Atrobucca geniae Ben-Tuvia, a kind of croaker.

Because of her more than fifty years of research, we know volumes about the behavior, ecology and taxonomy of sharks and other fish. Some of her many findings, according to Wings Worldquest, include the fact that lemon sharks will push the right target to receive a food reward and that some fish can change their sex within seconds.

Was Clark ever bitten by a shark? Once, but it wasn't on a dive and it wasn't from a live shark. While driving to a school to talk to students about sharks, an abrupt stop made the mounted jaw of a 12-foot tiger shark she was bringing with her slam into her arm, drawing blood.

ACTION ALERTS
  • Tell President Obama to protect Arctic wildlife from dangerous oil and gas drilling (Oceana)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
PAST SERIES

image: Eugenie Clark, 2006 WINGS Trading Card (Wings Worldquest)
No comments: Links to this post
Labels:

Monday, March 26, 2012

Women's History Month | Rosalind Franklin

It's a little-known fact: The groundbreaking Crick and Watson DNA model was based in large part on the research of crystallographer Rosalind Franklin

[In honor of Women's History Month, 13.7 Billion Years remembers 22 female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today.]

When we think of the structure of DNA, we often think of the model of Francis Crick and James D. Watson, who, along with Maurice Wilkins, were jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their "discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material."

What we rarely think of is the work done by Rosalind Franklin that led to the Crick and Watson model. Her premature death prevented her from sharing in the Nobel Prize because the prize is not awarded posthumously. She died at the age of 37 from ovarian cancer.

Born in 1920 in London, Franklin was a British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer whose research was key in understanding the molecular structures of coal, graphite, viruses and, most critically, DNA. Specifically, Franklin's X-ray diffraction images of DNA led to discovery of DNA double helix. According to a 1961 letter written by Crick to French biologist Jacques Monod discovered in the Archives of the Pasteur Institute and reprinted in "Nature Correspondence" in September 2003, Franklin's data was "the data we actually used" to formulate the 1953 hypothesis by Crick and Watson that defined the structure of DNA.

While her contribution to understanding DNA is often overlooked, Franklin has received several posthumous honors. In 2001, the U.S. National Cancer Institute established the Rosalind E. Franklin Award for Women in Science. In 2003, the Royal Society established the Rosalind Franklin Award, for an outstanding contribution to any area of natural science, engineering or technology. And in 2008, Columbia University awarded an Honorary Horwitz Prize to Franklin "for her seminal contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA."

It's long been said that behind every great man is a great woman. Well, behind the DNA double helix is Rosalind Franklin.

ACTION ALERTS
PAST SERIES

image: Rosalind Franklin  Wikimedia Commons)
No comments: Links to this post
Labels: ,

Friday, March 23, 2012

Women's History Month | Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt changed the way we see the Universe

[In honor of Women's History Month, 13.7 Billion Years remembers 22 female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today.]

Born in 1868 in Lancaster, Massachusetts, Henrietta Swan Leavitt changed the way we saw the universe. After graduating from Radcliffe College in 1892, Leavitt got a menial job at the Harvard College Observatory, earning $10.50 a week for counting and cataloging images of stars on photographic plates.

But her keen eye and close study of these plates, which contained images of 1,777 stars, led her to make a groundbreaking discovery that she published in 1908: the period-luminosity relationship of Cepheids, a class of extremely luminous stars.

Simply put, Leavitt discovered that the Cepheids that had greater intrinsic luminosity had longer periods, a relationship that was actually predictable. Since the Cepheids she studied were located in the Magellanic Clouds—two irregular dwarf galaxies in the southern hemisphere—and were thus relatively the same distance from the Earth, the relationship between stars' periods and luminosities became key in measuring distances in the Universe.

Her findings made possible the discoveries of the renowned American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who confirmed the existence of galaxies other than the Milky Way, greatly expanding our conception of the Universe.

In their book Measuring the Cosmos, David H. and Matthew D.H. Clark wrote, "If Henrietta Leavitt had provided the key to determine the size of the cosmos, then it was Edwin Powell Hubble who inserted it in the lock and provided the observations that allowed it to be turned."

Leavitt died in 1921, having received virtually no recognition for her accomplishments. Her colleague Solon I. Bailey wrote in an obituary, "She had the happy faculty of appreciating all that was worthy and lovable in others, and was possessed of a nature so full of sunshine that, to her, all of life became beautiful and full of meaning."

The asteroid 5383 Leavitt and the lunar crater Leavitt are named in her honor.

ACTION ALERTS
  • Join the Humane Society of the United States in asking Domino's to stop using gestation crates (HSUS)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
PAST SERIES

image: Henrietta Swan Leavitt (American Institute of Physics, Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Wikimedia Commons)
No comments: Links to this post
Labels: ,

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Women's History Month | Emmy Noether

"Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began." -- Albert Einstein

[In honor of Women's History Month, 13.7 Billion Years remembers 22 female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today.]

Born in the Bavarian town of Erlangen in 1882, Emmy Noether was described by Albert Einstein, among others, as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. The apple didn't fall far from the tree: Emmy's father, Max Noether, was one of the leading mathematicians of his day, specializing in algebraic geometry.

After studying mathematics at the University of Erlangen, where her father lectured, Noether worked at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen, but because women were generally not permmitted to hold academic positions, she worked for seven years without pay.

Her career spanned three periods of intense study and discovery covering different areas. From 1908 to 1919, she worked on algebraic invariants, developing in 1915 "Noether's theorem," which was called "one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics." Simply put, the theorem states that for every continuous symmetry of the action of a physical system, there is a corresponding conservation law. It has become a fundamental tool in modern theoretical physics.

Between 1920 and 1926, Noether began work on ring theory, an area of abstract algebra that studies structures and systems in which addition and multiplication are possible, such as "rings" of integers. The "Noetherian ring" is named after her. In his 1981 biography of Noether, German author Auguste Dick wrote that this work "changed the face of [abstract] algebra."

Between 1927 and 1935), she published major works on hypercomplex numbers and noncommutative algebras, unifying the representation theory of groups with the theory of modules. Overall, her groundbreaking work has remained vital to the modern development of mathematics and theoretical physics.

In a letter to The New York Times, Albert Einstein wrote:

In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began. In the realm of algebra, in which the most gifted mathematicians have been busy for centuries, she discovered methods which have proved of enormous importance in the development of the present-day younger generation of mathematicians."

Noether's studies took her to very edge of known mathematics. Perhaps that's why the lunar crater named after her is located on the dark side of the Moon.

ACTION ALERTS
  • Say NO to bee deaths, tell Congress to force EPA to suspend registration of Bayer’s controversial bee-toxic pesticide, clothianidin (Center for Food Safety)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
PAST SERIES

image: Emmy Noether, before 1910 Wikimedia Commons)
No comments: Links to this post
Labels: ,

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Women's History Month | Ellen Swallow Richards

Ellen Swallow Richards was the first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry

[In honor of Women's History Month, 13.7 Billion Years remembers 22 female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today.]

In his 1866 book Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, German biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term "Oekologie" (ecology) to describe the "household of nature."

In the United States, one person was critical in introducing the word "ecology" into English: Ellen Swallow Richards, who called for the "christening of a new science" during a lecture she delivered in Boston in 1892. In her view, this new line of study was an interdisciplinary branch of science that included consumer nutrition and environmental education. One main aspect of it eventually evolved into today's ecology, while the consumer nutrition element was split off and became home economics.

Born in 1842, Richards was the first woman admitted to and to receive a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later, became its first female instructor. She was also the first woman to be accepted into any school of science and technology in the United States and the first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry. Richards was America's leading female industrial and environmental chemist in the 19th century.

In 1887, when she was an instructor at the newly founded sanitary chemistry laboratory at the Lawrence Experiment Station in Massachusetts, the world's first trial station for drinking water purification and sewage treatment, Richards led a study of the state's water quality. Her data was used to identify pollution sources and improve sewage disposal. Because of her study, Massachusetts established the nation's first water-quality standards and the first modern sewage treatment plant.

In 1908, Richards was elected as the first president of the newly formed American Home Economics Association. Her many books on this subject include Food Materials and their Adulterations (1886), Conservation by Sanitation, The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning, The Cost of Living (1899), Air, Water, and Food (1900), The Cost of Food, The Cost of Shelter, The Art of Right Living, The Cost of Cleanness, Sanitation in Daily Life (1907) and Euthenics, the Science of Controllable Environment (1910).

"Perhaps the fact that I am not a radical and that I do not scorn womanly duties but claim it as a privilege to clean up and sort of supervise the room and sew things is winning me stronger allies than anything else," Richards wrote to her parents.

In 2011, Richards was listed as Number 8 on the MIT150 list of the top 150 innovators and ideas from MIT.

ACTION ALERTS
  • Tell Yahoo! to pull all whale and dolphin meat from its sites and put an international ban in place ( Change)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
PAST SERIES

image: (MIT Institute Archives & Special Collections, Wikimedia Commons)
No comments: Links to this post
Labels: ,

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Women's History Month | Inge Lehmann

Inge Lehmann discovered the Earth's inner core

[In honor of Women's History Month, 13.7 Billion Years remembers 22 female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today.]

Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann was born in 1888 in Copenhagen, into a world of intellectuals. Her father, Alfred Georg Lehmann, was an experimental psychologist. She attended a progressive high school run by Hanna Adler, whose nephew was the Nobel laureate physicist Niels Bohr. She studied mathematics at Cambridge and worked as an assistant to the geodesist Niels Eirk Norlund, who established seismic observatories in Denmark and Greenland.

In 1936, Lehmann became the first to suggest that inside the Earth's molten core there may be a solid inner core which has different physical properties to the outer core. Her argument was based on her research of primary seismic waves, or P-waves, a type of elastic wave that are produced by earthquakes that travel through the Earth and are recorded by seismographs. Her thesis of the existence Earth's inner core was soon adopted by the world's leading seismologists.

She won a host of awards for her achievements in science, including the Gold Medal of the Danish Royal Society of Science and Letters and election as a Fellow of the Royal Society. The asteroid 5632 was named Ingelehmann in her honor. In 1997, the American Geophysical Union founded the Inge Lehmann Medal to honor "outstanding contributions to the understanding of the structure, composition, and dynamics of the Earth’s mantle and core."

Perhaps it is fitting that a woman discovered the inner core of Earth (aka "Gaia," or Earth mother): According to research conducted at the Imperial College School of Medicine, London, and published in 2001 in the journal Clinical and Experimental Immunology, women may live longer than men because they have more "inner strength," a fact attributed to a stronger immune system.

Lehmann was a testament to that idea: She died in 1993 at the ripe old age of 104.

ACTION ALERTS
  • Tell Congress we need safer nuclear power plants now (NRDC)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
PAST SERIES

image: Inge Lehmann (credit: B.A. Bolt, Wikimedia Commons)
No comments: Links to this post
Labels: , , ,

Monday, March 19, 2012

Women's History Month | Elizabeth Blackwell

ELizabeth Blackwell was America's first female doctor

[In honor of Women's History Month, 13.7 Billion Years remembers 22 female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today.]

Born in 1821 in Bristol, England, Elizabeth Blackwell spent a good deal of her childhood in the United States, where her father Samuel Blackwell, a sugar refiner, moved the family (his wife and nine children) to New York City to set up a refinery.

In 1847, she was accepted to the Geneva Medical College in Geneva, New York, as a medical student. The only female to apply, the dean put her application up to a vote by the 150 male students, who, believing it was a joke, voted unanimously to accept her.

Two years later, she became the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States. She opened up her own practice in New York City, publishing in 1852 her first book, The Laws of Life with Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls.

In 1853, she established a dispensary near Tompkins Square. Within four years, it was expanded into the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, where women not only worked as attending physicians, but also served on the board of trustees and the executive committee. During the Civil War, the infirmary worked with social reformer Dorothea Dix to train nurses for the Union effort.

Throughout her career, Elizabeth was a tireless reformer, dedicating her efforts to several movements, including moral reform, medical education, sanitation, women's rights, medical ethics and anti-vivisection.

In 1895 she published her autobiography, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women. In it, she gave credit to her upbringing:

"It is a great advantage to have been born one of a large family group of healthy, active children, surrounded by wholesome influences. The natural and healthy discipline which children exercise upon one another, the variety of tastes and talents, the cheerful companionship, even the rivalries, misunderstandings, and reconciliations where free play is given to natural disposition, form an excellent discipline for after-life."


ACTION ALERTS
  • Public comments accepted until April 19: Tell the New England Fishery Management Council to protect marine health and stop overfishing by industrial trawling in New England waters (Pew Environment Group)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
PAST SERIES

image: Portrait of Elizabeth Blackwell by Joseph Stanley Kozlowski, 1905. Upstate Medical University, New York. (Wikimedia Commons)
No comments: Links to this post
Labels: ,

Friday, March 16, 2012

Women's History Month | Annie Maunder

Annie Maunder was the first woman elected to the Royal Astronomy Society

[In honor of Women's History Month, 13.7 Billion Years remembers 22 female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today.]

Annie Russell was born in 1868 in County Tyrone, Ireland, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. But her object of devotion wasn't so much the Creator in the Bible as it was the creator of our solar system, the Earth and us: the Sun.

Two years after passing the degree exams at Cambridge University in 1889 as the top mathematician at Girton College, Cambridge's first residential women's college, Russell began work at the Greenwich Royal Observatory, assisting the British astronomer Edward Walter Maunder, who was known for his work on sunspots, a temporary phenomena on the surface of the Sun that appear as visibly dark spots, caused by magnetic activity. During her first few years, she photographed the Sun and tracked the movements of its sunspots. In 1895, the two married and she took his name, becoming Annie Maunder.

Together, the Maunders went on expeditions to study and record solar eclipses and in 1898, they traveled to India, where Annie took the first photographs of the Sun's corona during a solar eclipse. In 1908, they co-wrote the book The Heavens and Their Story. Their work showed that the climate on Earth was influenced by variations in sunspot activity. In 1916, she became the first woman ever elected to the Royal Astronomical Society. The Moon crater "Maunder" was named to honor both Walter and Annie Maunder.

ACTION ALERTS
PAST SERIES

image: Ocular projection of the Sun with large sunspots using a spotting scope (Wikimedia Commons)
No comments: Links to this post
Labels: ,

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Women's History Month | Sophie Germain

Though she couldn't make a career out of mathematics due to her gender, Sophie Germain became one of the pioneers of elasticity theory

[In honor of Women's History Month, 13.7 Billion Years remembers 22 female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today.]

After the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, many Parisians were forced to remain indoors to avoid the chaos of the burgeoning French revolution outside. Such was the case with young Sophie Germain, the daughter of a wealthy bourgeoisie representative to the États-Généraux, the legislative assembly under France's Old Regime.

And of course, she did what any inquisitive 13-year-old would have done in her situation: explore her father's extensive library. (Like many households of the time, the home library was a decidedly male domain.) There, she came across the French mathematician J. E. Montucla's 1758 magnum opus, L'Histoire des Mathématiques, the first serious history of mathematics. In this classic tome, notes Mary Gray in the 1987 book Women of Mathematics: A Bibliographic Sourcebook, Germain was particularly moved by the death of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. According to Plutarch's account, Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier during the Second Punic War after refusing to meet the Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus, saying that he had to finish working on a mathematic diagram.

In 1809, the Paris Academy of Sciences sponsored a contest concerning the experiments that German physicist Ernst Chladni conducted using vibrating plates. The object of the contest was, according to the Academy, "to give the mathematical theory of the vibration of an elastic surface and to compare the theory to experimental evidence."

But when Italian mathematician and astronomer Joseph-Louis Lagrange said that solving such a difficult problem would require the creation of an entirely new branch of mathematics, no one dared to try—except two brave souls: French mathematician and physicist Denis Poisson and Sophie Germain. Poisson later moved from contestant to judge, leaving Germain the sole contestant. With her third submission (the contest had been extended several times), Germain won, becoming the first woman to be awarded a prize from the Academy.

Still, she was not allowed to attend the Academy's sessions, which were open only to members (who were men) and their wives. Seven years later, only after becoming friends with Academy Secretary Joseph Fourier was she finally allowed access. (Sometimes, you have to use all the tools at your disposal.)

Her prize-winning paper, Research on the Theory of Elastic Surfaces, made her one of the pioneers of elasticity theory, a fundamental theory of solid mechanics. But she also excelled in number theory (she was noted for her work dealing with Fermat's Last Theorem), psychology and philosophy. In one of her two philosophical works, the laboriously titled Various Thoughts and General Considerations on the State of Science and Humanities at Different Epochs of Their Culture, Germain argued that there is no difference between the sciences and the humanities. For someone who obviously excelled in both, perhaps that is true. For the vast majority of the rest of us, we'll just have to take her word for it.

ACTION ALERTS
  • DUE TODAY: Tell your representative to reinstate the Prescott Grant, which has helped IFAW rescue countless marine mammals and provide crucial data to help shape NOAA policies, but which President Obama eliminated in his proposed 2013 federal budget (IFAW)
  • Tell Sierra Trading Post, Adobe and DKNY to stop supporting greenwashing through SFI and work with ForestEthics to support scientifically proven forest initiatives (ForestEthics)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
PAST SERIES

image: Portrait of Sophie Germain (Wikimedia Commons)
No comments: Links to this post
Labels: ,

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Women's History Month | Jeanne Villepreux-Power

Marine biology pioneer Jeanne Villepreux-Power invented the aquarium to study aquatic life

[In honor of Women's History Month, 13.7 Billion Years remembers 22 female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today.]

Born in 1794 in the small village of Juillac in central France, Jeanne Villepreux-Power was the daughter of a shoemaker. A self-taught naturalist, she was a pioneering marine biologist who studied mollusks, argonauts and fossil shells.

She gained prominence throughout Europe for her groundbreaking research into the paper nautilus (Argonauta argo, pictured), an unusual species of tropical pelagic octopus, the female of which creates a paper-thin eggcase, hence the name. From 1832 to 1842, she was the only woman at the Gioenian Academy of Natural Sciences in Catania, Italy.

She is also the inventor of the aquarium, several types of which she constructed to study live mollusks. The English biologist Professor Richard Owen (known for coining the word "dinosaur") dubbed her the "Mother of Aquariophily." In 1997, a crater on Venus discovered by the Magellan probe was named after her.

ACTION ALERTS
  • DUE TOMORROW, March 15: Tell your representative to reinstate the Prescott Grant, which has helped IFAW rescue countless marine mammals and provide crucial data to help shape NOAA policies, but which President Obama eliminated in his proposed 2013 federal budget (IFAW)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
PAST SERIES

image: Argonauta argo at Oslo Zoological Museum (Wikimedia Commons)
No comments: Links to this post
Labels: , ,

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Women's History Month | Anna Atkins

Anna Atkins was the first female photographer

[In honor of Women's History Month, 13.7 Billion Years remembers 22 female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today.]

Sometimes tragedy can open doors. Such was the case with Anna Watkins. Her mother died after she was born on March 16, 1799, in Kent, England. So she was raised by her father, John George Children, a respected scientist, Fellow of the Royal Society and colleague of such leading scientific minds of the day as chemist Humphry Davy and astronomer William Herschel. And it was this exposure that led to Anna becoming a respected botanist and photographer.

Atkins was the first female photographer, having been one of the few practitioners of the process for making cyanotypes, better known as blueprints (and mainly used for producing architectural prints). She was also the first person to publish a book composed entirely of photographic images.

Published in batches between 1841 and 1853, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions may have been intended as a companion volume to William Harvey's 1841 book Manual of British Algae, which was not illustrated. The New York Public Library Digital Gallery has images of the book. "[W]hile the edition was probably not many more than the dozen copies known today," notes the NYPL, "it stands as an important and generally overlooked milestone in the history of scientific illustration."

ACTION ALERTS
  • Tell your senators to support the Production Tax Credit (PTC), a main financial vehicle to support investment in renewable energy—like algae fuel (Power of Wind)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
PAST SERIES

image: A photogram of algae made by Anna Atkins as part of her 1843 book, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, the first book composed entirely of photographic images (Wikimedia Commons)
No comments: Links to this post
Labels:

Monday, March 12, 2012

Women's History Month | Caroline Herschel

"she whom the moon ruled / like us / levitating into the night sky /
riding the polished lenses" -- from "Planetarium," by Adrienne Rich, about Caroline Herschel

[In honor of Women's History Month, 13.7 Billion Years remembers 22 female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today.]

Sir William Herschel (1738-1822) is one of the most celebrated astronomers of all time, having discovered Uranus and two of its moons, Titania and Oberon, as well as two moons of Saturn, Mimas and Enceladus. He was also the first to see that the solar system is moving through space and that the Milky Way galaxy has the shape of a disk. He also coined the word "asteroid."

But he wasn't alone. He had help. Born in 1750, William's sister Caroline Herschel was also an astronomer and a close collaborator. Her decision to commit to the rather (at the time) unfeminine life of stargazing was in no small part determined by the fact that her stunted growth (she was 4'3" tall) due a childhood bout of typhus meant she would never pursue marriage. But while she may not have found love, she found many heavenly bodies—and even galaxies. She discovered Messier 110, a dwarf spheroidal galaxy that is a satellite of the Andromeda Galaxy.

She was the first woman to discover comets, and held the record for most comets discovered by a woman until the 1980s, when Carolyn Shoemaker took the title. Herschel is most famous for discovering the periodic comet 35P/Herschel-Rigollet, which she first observed on December 21, 1788. For the next two months, it was observed by Nevil Maskelyne at the Greenwich Observatory and by Charles Messier at the Paris Observatory, with Maskelyne making the final observation on February 5, 1789, before its orbit plunged it into deep space. It is named after her and Roger Rigollet, who rediscovered it when it came close in 1939.

In 1828, she was awarded the Gold Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society. No woman would receive this award again until American astronomer Vera Rubin in 1996. In 1846, at the age of 96, she was awarded the Gold Medal for Science by the King of Prussia. C. Herschel, a crater on the Moon, is named after her. Adrienne Rich's 1968 poem "Planetarium" celebrates her life and achievements.

35P/Herschel-Rigollet takes 155 years to orbit the Sun. Its next perihelion passage, the point in its wide elliptical orbit where it comes nearest the Sun, will be in the year 2092. That's just 80 years away. Get those telescopes ready.

ACTION ALERTS
  • Tell your senators to vote no on the Roberts Amendment which would open protected areas to oil drilling (Wilderness Society)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
PAST SERIES

image: Portrait of Caroline Herschel, 1829, in Agnes Clerke's The Herschels and Modern Astronomy (1895) (Wikimedia Commons)
No comments: Links to this post
Labels: ,

Friday, March 9, 2012

Women's History Month | Émilie du Châtelet

"A great man whose only fault was being a woman." -- Voltaire on Émilie du Châtelet, in a letter to King Frederick II of Prussia

[In honor of Women's History Month, 13.7 Billion Years remembers 22 female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today.]

Born in 1706, Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet was a French mathematician, physicist and author, known for her translation and commentary on Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, one of the most important works in the history of science. Published ten years after her death in 1759, it remains the standard French translation of Newton's masterwork.

Émilie du Châtelet was a scintillating figure of the Age of Enlightenment, particularly because she was an intellectual powerhouse among men, quite uncommon at the time. By the age of 12, she was fluent in Latin, Italian, Greek and German. She translated Greek and Latin plays and philosophy into French. She studied fencing, riding, literature and science. She played the harpsichord, sang opera and acted. She was not only Voltaire's lover, but his intellectual sparring partner. In the preface to her translation of The Fable of the Bees, a book by Bernard Mandeville which outlined several key economic concepts that presaged Adam Smith, du Châtelet argued that women should have access to secondary education like men.

In 1737, she published Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu about her research into the nature of fire, which predicted the discovery of infrared radiation. Three years later, she published Institutions de Physique, in which she unified the theories of Gottfried Leibniz and Willem 's Gravesande to demonstrate that the energy of a moving object is proportional to the square of its velocity (Ek = 1⁄2mv²), not just its velocity, proving Newton wrong. She also wrote works on optics, rational linguistics, free will, happiness and a critical analysis of the Bible.

And while she used her skill in mathematics to create methods to win at gambling, she once lost the modern equivalent of $1 million while gambling at the court of Fontainebleau. To pay back her debt quickly, she concocted a plan in which she paid tax collectors a low amount of money for the right to future earnings, promising a piece of these future amounts to her debtors. In devising this credit method, she created an early form of modern credit derivatives.

12059 du Châtelet, a main-belt minor planet discovered in 1998 by Eric Walter Elst at the La Silla Observatory in Chile is named after her, as is the du Châtelet crater on Venus.

ACTION ALERTS
  • Tell the Indonesia Minister for Energy and Mineral Resources to protect Bangka Island from a destructive mining project (Rainforest Rescue)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
PAST SERIES

image: Portrait of Émilie du Châtelet by Maurice Quentin de La Tour ()
No comments: Links to this post
Labels: ,

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Women's History Month | Mary the Jewess

"Keep the fume and take care that none of it fly away. And let your measure be with a gentle fire such as is the Measure of the heat of the Sun in the Month of June or July." -- Mary the Jewess, The Dialogue of Mary and Aros on the Magistery of Hermes

[In honor of Women's History Month, 13.7 Billion Years remembers 22 female scientists throughout history who may be a bit overlooked today.]

Mary the Jewess invented two apparatuses for practicing alchemy: the kerotakis, an airtight device used to heat substances and collect the vapors, a Hermetic arts practice that is the origin of the phrase, "hermetically sealed"; and the bain-marie, a gentle heat water bath named after her and which is still in use today. She also perfected the tribikos, a three-armed pot still used to purify substances through distillation.

These accomplishments are impressive, but even moreso considering that Mary was a woman who lived sometime between the first and third centuries AD. She is considered to be the Western world's first real alchemist. Zosimos of Panopolis, the 4th-century author of the first known books on alchemy, penned the most concrete details of Mary's life, calling her a "sage."

In the ancient world, Mary was accorded the utmost respect. She was known as the Mary the Prophetess and the Daughter of Plato. And though her inventions were made in an attempt to turn metals into gold, they represent significant advances in chemistry that are still in use today.

She is also known for several cryptic sayings, such as the Axiom of Maria: "One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth." But perhaps her search for the recipe for gold was really about searching for something more personal: The psychologist Carl Jung saw her axiom as a metaphor for the process of individuation.

ACTION ALERTS
  • Ask your federal legislators to support an end to biomedical research on chimpanzees and ask that they cosponsor the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act (H.R.1513/S.810) (NEAVS/Project R&R)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
PAST SERIES
image: Engraving depicting Maria Prophetissa from Michael Maier's book Symbola Aurea Mensae Duodecim Nationum (1617) (Wikimedia Commons)
No comments: Links to this post
Labels:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)