Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1906-1972)

Maria Goeppert-Mayer (June 28, 1906 – February 20, 1972) was a German-born American theoretical physicist, and Nobel laureate in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She is the second female laureate in physics, after Marie Curie.

Biography
Maria Goeppert was born in Kattowitz (now Katowice, Poland), within the German Empire's Prussian Province of Silesia. Her family moved to Göttingen in 1910 when her father Friedrich was appointed Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Göttingen. On her father's side, Goeppert-Mayer was supposedly a seventh-generation professor. From a young age, she was surrounded by the students and lecturers from the university, intellectuals including the future Nobel winners, Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac and Wolfgang Pauli.

In 1924, Goeppert passed the university's abitur entrance examinations, and then enrolled there in the fall. Among her professors at Göttingen were three future Nobel prize winners: Max Born, James Franck and Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus. Goeppert completed her Doctor of Philosophy degree (Ph.D.) at the University of Göttingen in 1930, and in that same year, she married Dr. Joseph Edward Mayer, an assistant of James Franck. The new couple next moved to the United States, Mayer's home country.

For the next few years, Goeppert-Mayer worked at unofficial or volunteer positions at the university at which her husband was professor—first at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1931–39, then Columbia University in 1940-46, and after that the University of Chicago. During this time, Goeppert-Mayer was unable to gain a professional appointment at Joseph's universities due in part to both sexism and strict rules against nepotism. However, she was able to find other opportunities, including a teaching position at the Sarah Lawrence College, a research position with Columbia University's Substitute Alloy Materials Project and with the Opacity Project, and she also spent some time at the Los Alamos Laboratory.

During her husband Joseph Mayer's time at the University of Chicago, Goeppert-Mayer was able to become a voluntary Associate Professor of Physics at the school. In addition, when the nearby Argonne National Laboratory was founded on July 1, 1946, Goeppert-Mayer was offered a part-time job there as a Senior Physicist in the Theoretical Physics Division. It was during her time at Chicago and Argonne that she developed a mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells, the work for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, shared with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Paul Wigner.

Goeppert-Mayer's model explained "why certain numbers of nucleons in the nucleus of an atom cause an atom to be extremely stable". This had been baffling scientists for some time. These numbers are called "magic numbers". She postulated, against the received wisdom of the time, that the nucleus is like a series of closed shells and pairs of neutrons and protons like to couple together in what is called spin orbit coupling. This is like the Earth spinning on its axis as the Earth itself is spinning around the Sun. Goeppert-Mayer described the idea elegantly:

"Think of a room full of waltzers. Suppose they go round the room in circles, each circle enclosed within another. Then imagine that in each circle, you can fit twice as many dancers by having one pair go clockwise and another pair go counterclockwise. Then add one more variation; all the dancers are spinning twirling round and round like tops as they circle the room, each pair both twirling and circling. But only some of those that go counterclockwise are twirling counterclockwise. The others are twirling clockwise while circling counterclockwise. The same is true of those that are dancing around clockwise: some twirl clockwise, others twirl counterclockwise."

At the same time, there were German scientists working on exactly the same thing. After, they had published their results, Goeppert-Mayer sought to collaborate with them. One from the German team, Jensen, worked with her to produce a book in 1950 called Elementary Theory of Nuclear Shell Structure. In 1963, Goeppert-Mayer and Jensen shared the Nobel Prize for Physics "...for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure." She was quoted as saying, "Winning the prize wasn't half as exciting as doing the work."

During the 1940s and early 1950s, Goeppert-Mayer worked out equations in optical opacity, while working for Edward Teller - equations that were used for Teller's and others' work in the design of the first hydrogen bomb (detonated on November 1, 1952).

In 1960, Goeppert-Mayer was appointed to a position as a (full) Professor of Physics at the University of California at San Diego. Although she suffered from a stroke shortly after arriving there, she continued to teach and conduct research for a number of years.

Other notable work
In her doctoral thesis in 1931, Goeppert-Mayer worked out the theory of possible two-photon absorption by atoms. This was not confirmed experimentally until the development of the laser in the 1960s. To honor her fundamental contribution to this area, the unit for the two-photon absorption cross section is named the Goeppert-Mayer (GM) unit.

Death and legacy
Goeppert-Mayer died in San Diego, California, in 1972 after a heart attack that had struck her the previous year had left her comatose.

After her death, an award in her name was set up by the American Physical Society to honor young female physicists at the beginning of their careers. Open to all female physicists who hold Ph.D.s, the winner receives money and the opportunity to give guest lectures about her research at four major institutions. Two of Goeppert-Mayer's former universities also honor her. The University of Chicago presents an award each year to an outstanding young woman scientist or engineer, and the University of California at San Diego hosts an annual Maria Goeppert-Mayer symposium, bringing together female researchers to discuss current science. Crater Goeppert-Mayer on Venus (diameter of about 35 km) is named after Maria.

Margaret Floy Washburn (1871-1939)

From Wikipedia:
Margaret Floy Washburn (July 25, 1871 – October 29, 1939), leading American psychologist in the early 20th century, was best known for her experimental work in animal behavior and motor theory development. She was the first woman to be granted a PhD in psychology (1894).

Biography
Born July 25, 1871 in New York City, she was raised in Harlem by her father, Francis, an Episcopal priest, and her mother, Elizabeth Floy, who came from a prosperous New York family. She was an only child, entered school at age 7 and at age 9 moved to Ulster county, New York when her father was placed in a parish there. She graduated from high school in June 1886, at age fifteen, and that fall she entered Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, as a preparatory student. She there became a member of Kappa Alpha Theta fraternity for women and graduated in 1891. She became determined to study under James McKeen Cattell in the newly established psychological laboratory at Columbia University. As Columbia had not yet admitted a woman graduate student, she was admitted only as an "auditor." She did well and Cattell encouraged her to enter the newly organized Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University, which she did in 1892.

At Cornell, she studied under E. B. Titchener, his first and only major graduate student at that time. She conducted an experimental study of the methods of equivalences in tactual perception and earned her Master's degree in absentia from Vassar College in 1893 for that work. She did her doctor's thesis on the influence of visual imagery on judgements of tactual distance and direction. This work was sent by Titchener to Wilhelm Wundt and published in Philosophische Studien (1895). In 1894, she became the second woman to receive a PhD in psychology and was elected to the newly established American Psychological Association, after Mary Calkins.

She then took teaching posts, in turn, at Wells College, Cornell’s Sage College, and University of Cincinnati. At Cincinnati, she was the only woman on the faculty. In 1903, she returned to Vassar College as Associate Professor of Philosophy, where she remained until 1937 when a stroke necessitated her retirement (as Emeritus Professor of Psychology). She never fully recovered and died at her home in Poughkeepsie, New York on October 29, 1939. She never married, choosing instead to devote herself to her career and the care of her parents.

Professional career
Washburn was a major figure in psychology in the United States in the first decades of the 20th century, substantially adding to the development of psychology as a science and a scholarly profession. Washburn used her experimental studies in animal behavior and cognition to present her idea that mental (not just behavioral) events are legitimate and important psychological areas for study in her book, The Animal Mind (1908). This, of course, went against the established doctrine in academic psychology that the mental was not observable and therefore not appropriate for serious scientific investigation.

Besides her experimental work, she read widely and drew on French and German experiments of higher mental processes stating they were intertwined with tentative physical movements. She viewed consciousness as an epiphenomenon of excitation and inhibition of motor discharge. She presented a complete motor theory in Movement and Mental Imagery (1916). During the 1920s she continued to amass experimental data from around the world to buttress her argument. She remained anchored in behaviorist tenets but continued to argue for the mind in this process. She took ideas from all major schools of thought in psychology, behaviorism, structuralism, functionalism, and Gestalt psychology, but rejected the more speculative theories of psychodynamics as being too ephemeral. In current psychology research, echoes of Washburn's insistence that behavior is part of thinking can be seen in dynamic systems approach that Thelen and Smith (1994) use to explain the development of cognition in humans.

Washburn's published writings span thirty-five years and include some 127 articles on many topics including spatial perception, memory, experimental aesthetics, individual differences, animal psychology, emotion and affective consciousness. At various times in her career, she was an editor for the American Journal of Psychology, Psychological Bulletin, Journal of Animal Behavior, Psychological Review, and Journal of Comparative Psychology. She was the president of the American Psychological Association in 1921, an honorific title at that time. She was the first woman psychologist and the second woman scientist to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1932.

Emmy Noether (1882-1935)

Amalie Emmy Noether,(23 March 1882 – 14 April 1935) was a German American mathematician known for her groundbreaking contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. Described by David Hilbert, Albert Einstein and others as the most important woman in the history of mathematics, she revolutionized the theories of rings, fields, and algebras. In physics, Noether's theorem explains the fundamental connection between symmetry and conservation laws.

She was born to a Jewish family in the Bavarian town of Erlangen; her father was the mathematician Max Noether. Emmy originally planned to teach French and English after passing the required examinations, but instead studied mathematics at the University of Erlangen, where her father lectured. After completing her dissertation in 1907 under the supervision of Paul Gordan, she worked at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen without pay for seven years. In 1915 she was invited by David Hilbert and Felix Klein to join the mathematics department at the University of Göttingen, a world-renowned center of mathematical research. The philosophical faculty objected, however, and she spent four years lecturing under Hilbert's name. Her habilitation was approved in 1919, allowing her to obtain the rank of privatdozent.

Noether remained a leading member of the Göttingen mathematics department until 1933; her students were sometimes called the "Noether boys". In 1924, Dutch mathematician B. L. van der Waerden joined her circle and soon became the leading expositor of Noether's ideas: her work was the foundation for the second volume of his influential 1931 textbook, Moderne Algebra. By the time of her plenary address at the 1932 International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich, her algebraic acumen was recognized around the world. The following year, Germany's Nazi government dismissed Jews from university positions, and Noether moved to the United States to take up a position at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. In 1935 she underwent surgery for an ovarian cyst and, despite signs of a recovery, died four days later at the age of 53.

Noether's mathematical work has been divided into three "epochs". In the first (1908–1919), she made significant contributions to the theories of algebraic invariants and number fields. Her work on differential invariants in the calculus of variations, Noether's theorem, has been called "one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics". In the second epoch, (1920–1926), she began work that "changed the face of [abstract] algebra".

In her classic paper Idealtheorie in Ringbereichen (Theory of Ideals in Ring Domains, 1921) Noether developed the theory of ideals in commutative rings into a powerful tool with wide-ranging applications. She made elegant use of the ascending chain condition, and objects satisfying it are named Noetherian in her honor. In the third epoch, (1927–1935), she published major works on noncommutative algebras and hypercomplex numbers and united the representation theory of groups with the theory of modules and ideals. In addition to her own publications, Noether was generous with her ideas and is credited with several lines of research published by other mathematicians, even in fields far removed from her main work, such as algebraic topology.

Biography
Noether grew up in the Bavarian city of Erlangen, depicted here in a 1916 postcardEmmy's father, Max Noether, was descended from a family of wholesale traders in Germany. He had been paralyzed by poliomyelitis at the age of fourteen. He regained mobility, but one leg remained affected. Largely self-taught, he was awarded a doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1868. After teaching there for seven years, he took a position in the Bavarian city of Erlangen, where he met and married Ida Amalia Kaufmann, the daughter of a prosperous merchant.

Max Noether's mathematical contributions were to algebraic geometry mainly, following in the footsteps of Alfred Clebsch. His best known results are the Brill–Noether theorem and the residue, or AF+BG theorem; several other theorems are associated with him, including Max Noether's theorem.

Emmy Noether was born on 23 March 1882, the first of four children. Her first name was "Amalie", after her mother and paternal grandmother, but she began using her middle name at a young age. As a girl, she was well-liked. She did not stand out academically although she was known for being clever and friendly. Emmy was near-sighted and talked with a minor lisp during childhood. A family friend recounted a story years later about young Emmy quickly solving a brain teaser at a children's party, showing logical acumen at that early age.

Emmy was taught to cook and clean—as were most girls of the time—and she took piano lessons. She pursued none of these activities with passion, although she loved to dance.

Of her three brothers, only Fritz Noether, born in 1884, is remembered for his academic accomplishments. After studying in Munich he made a reputation for himself in applied mathematics. Her eldest brother, Alfred, was born in 1883, was awarded a doctorate in chemistry from Erlangen in 1909, but died nine years later. The youngest, Gustav Robert, was born in 1889. Very little is known about his life; he suffered from chronic illness and died in 1928.

University of Erlangen
Paul Gordan supervised Noether's doctoral dissertation on invariants of biquadratic formsEmmy Noether showed early proficiency in French and English. In the spring of 1900 she took the examination for teachers of these languages and received an overall score of sehr gut (very good). Her performance qualified her to teach languages at schools reserved for girls, but she chose instead to continue her studies at the University of Erlangen.

This was an unconventional decision; two years earlier, the Academic Senate of the university had declared that allowing coeducation would "overthrow all academic order".

One of only two women students in a university of 986, Noether was forced to audit classes and required the permission of individual professors whose lectures she wished to attend. Despite the obstacles, on 14 July 1903 she passed the graduation exam at a Realgymnasium in Nuremberg.

During the 1903–04 winter semester, she studied at the University of Göttingen, attending lectures given by astronomer Karl Schwarzschild and mathematicians Hermann Minkowski, Otto Blumenthal, Felix Klein, and David Hilbert. Soon thereafter, restrictions on women's rights in that university were rescinded.

Noether returned to Erlangen. She officially reentered the university on 24 October 1904, and declared her intention to focus solely on mathematics. Under the supervision of Paul Gordan she wrote her dissertation, Über die Bildung des Formensystems der ternären biquadratischen Form (On Complete Systems of Invariants for Ternary Biquadratic Forms, 1907). Although it had been well received, Noether later described her thesis as "crap".

For the next seven years (1908–1915) she taught at the University of Erlangen's Mathematical Institute without pay, occasionally substituting for her father when he was too ill to lecture. In 1910 and 1911 she published an extension of her thesis work from three variables to n variables.

Noether sometimes used postcards to discuss abstract algebra with her colleague, Ernst Fischer; this card is postmarked 10 April 1915Gordan retired in the spring of 1910, but continued to teach occasionally with his successor, Erhard Schmidt, who left shortly afterward for a position in Breslau. Gordan retired from teaching altogether in 1911 with the arrival of his second successor, Ernst Fischer. Gordan died in December 1912.

According to Hermann Weyl, Fischer was an important influence on Noether, in particular by introducing her to the work of David Hilbert. From 1913 to 1916 Noether published several papers extending and applying Hilbert's methods to mathematical objects such as fields of rational functions and the invariants of finite groups. This phase marks the beginning of her engagement with abstract algebra, the field of mathematics to which she would make groundbreaking contributions.

Noether and Fischer shared lively enjoyment of mathematics and would often discuss lectures long after they were over; Noether is known to have sent postcards to Fischer continuing her train of mathematical thoughts.

University of Göttingen
In the spring of 1915, Noether was invited to return to the University of Göttingen by David Hilbert and Felix Klein. Their effort to recruit her, however, was blocked by the philologists and historians among the philosophical faculty: women, they insisted, should not become privatdozent. One faculty member protested: "What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?"

Hilbert responded with indignation, stating, "I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission as privatdozent. After all, we are a university, not a bath house."


In 1915 David Hilbert invited Emmy Noether to join the mathematics department at the University of Göttingen, challenging the views of some of his colleagues that a woman should not be allowed to teach at a universityNoether left for Göttingen in late April; two weeks later her mother died suddenly in Erlangen. She had previously received medical care for an eye condition, but its nature and impact on her death is unknown. At about the same time Noether's father retired and her brother joined the German Army to serve in World War I. She returned to Erlangen for several weeks, mostly to care for her aging father.

During her first years teaching at Göttingen she did not have an official position and was not paid; her family paid for her room and board and supported her academic work. Her lectures often were advertised under Hilbert's name, and Noether would provide "assistance".

Soon after arriving at Göttingen, however, she demonstrated her capabilities by proving the theorem now known as Noether's theorem, which shows that a conservation law is associated with any differentiable symmetry of a physical system.

American physicists Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill argue in their book Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe that Noether's theorem is "certainly one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics, possibly on a par with the Pythagorean theorem".

The mathematics department at the University of Göttingen allowed Noether's habilitation in 1919, four years after she had begun lecturing at the schoolWhen World War I ended, the German Revolution of 1918–19 brought a significant change in social attitudes, including more rights for women. In 1919 the University of Göttingen allowed Noether to proceed with her habilitation (eligibility for tenure). Her oral examination was held in late May, and she successfully delivered her habilitation lecture in June.

Three years later she received a letter from the Prussian Minister for Science, Art, and Public Education, in which he conferred on her the title of nicht beamteter ausserordentlicher Professor (an untenured professor with limited internal administrative rights and functions. This was an unpaid "extraordinary" professorship, not the higher "ordinary" professorship, which was a civil-service position. Although it recognized the importance of her work, the position still provided no salary. Noether was not paid for her lectures until she was appointed to the special position of Lehrauftrag für Algebra a year later.

Seminal work in abstract algebra
Although Noether's theorem had a profound effect upon physics, among mathematicians she is best remembered for her seminal contributions to abstract algebra. As Nathan Jacobson says in his Introduction to Noether's Collected Papers,

The development of abstract algebra, which is one of the most distinctive innovations of twentieth century mathematics, is largely due to her – in published papers, in lectures, and in personal influence on her contemporaries.

Noether's groundbreaking work in algebra began in 1920. In collaboration with W. Schmeidler, she then published a paper about the theory of ideals in which they defined left and right ideals in a ring. The following year she published a landmark paper called, Idealtheorie in Ringbereichen, analyzing ascending chain conditions with regard to ideals. A noted algebraist, Irving Kaplansky, has called this work "revolutionary", and the publication gave rise to the term "Noetherian ring" and several other mathematical objects being dubbed, Noetherian.

In 1924, a young Dutch mathematician, B. L. van der Waerden, arrived at the University of Göttingen. He immediately began working with Noether, who provided invaluable methods of abstract conceptualization. van der Waerden later said that her originality was "absolute beyond comparison".

In 1931 he published Moderne Algebra, a central text in the field; its second volume borrowed heavily from Noether's work. Although Emmy Noether did not seek recognition, he included as a note in the seventh edition "based in part on lectures by E. Artin and E. Noether". She sometimes allowed her colleagues and students to receive credit for her ideas, helping them develop their careers at the expense of her own.

van der Waerden's visit was part of a convergence of mathematicians from all over the world to Göttingen, which became a major hub of mathematical and physical research. From 1926 to 1930 the Russian topologist, Pavel Alexandrov, lectured at the university, and he and Noether quickly became good friends. He began referring to her as der Noether, using the masculine German article as a term of endearment to show his respect. She tried to arrange for him to obtain a position at Göttingen as a regular professor, but was only able to help him secure a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation.

They met regularly and enjoyed discussions about the intersections of algebra and topology. In his 1935 memorial address, Alexandrov named Emmy Noether "the greatest woman mathematician of all time".

Lecturing and students
In Göttingen, Noether supervised more than a dozen doctoral students; her first was Grete Hermann, who defended her dissertation in February 1925. She later spoke reverently of her "dissertation-mother".

Noether also supervised Max Deuring, who distinguished himself as an undergraduate and went on to contribute significantly to the field of arithmetic geometry; Hans Fitting, remembered for Fitting's theorem and the Fitting lemma; and Zeng Jiongzhi, who proved Tsen's theorem. She also worked closely with Wolfgang Krull, who greatly advanced commutative algebra with his Hauptidealsatz and his dimension theory for commutative rings.

In addition to her mathematical insight, Noether was respected for her consideration of others. Although she sometimes acted rudely toward those who disagreed with her, she nevertheless gained a reputation for constant helpfulness and patient guidance of new students. Her loyalty to mathematical precision caused one colleague to name her "a severe critic", but she combined this demand for accuracy with a nurturing attitude.

A colleague later described her this way: "Completely unegotistical and free of vanity, she never claimed anything for herself, but promoted the works of her students above all."

Her frugal lifestyle at first was due to being denied pay for her work; however, even after the university began paying her a small salary in 1923, she continued to live a simple and modest life. She was paid more generously later in her life, but saved half of her salary to bequeath to her nephew, Gottfried E. Noether.

Mostly unconcerned about appearance and manners, she focused on her studies to the exclusion of romance and fashion. A distinguished algebraist Olga Taussky-Todd described a luncheon, during which Noether, wholly engrossed in a discussion of mathematics, "gesticulated wildly" as she ate and "spilled her food constantly and wiped it off from her dress, completely unperturbed".

Appearance-conscious students cringed as she retrieved the handkerchief from her blouse and ignored the increasing disarray of her hair during a lecture. Two female students once approached her during a break in a two-hour class to express their concern, but were unable to break through the energetic mathematics discussion she was having with other students.

According to van der Waerden's obituary of Emmy Noether, she did not follow a lesson plan for her lectures, which frustrated some students. Instead, she used her lectures as a spontaneous discussion time with her students, to think through and clarify important cutting-edge problems in mathematics. Some of her most important results were developed in these lectures, and the lecture notes of her students formed the basis for several important textbooks, such as those of van der Waerden and Deuring.

Noether spoke quickly—reflecting the speed of her thoughts, many said—and demanded great concentration from her students. Students who disliked her style often felt alienated; one wrote in a notebook with regard to a class that ended at 1:00 pm: "It's 12:50, thank God!"

Some pupils felt that she relied too much on spontaneous discussions. Her most dedicated students, however, relished the enthusiasm with which she approached mathematics, especially since her lectures often built on earlier work they had done together.

She developed a close circle of colleagues and students who thought along similar lines and tended to exclude those who did not. "Outsiders" who occasionally visited Noether's lectures usually spent only 30 minutes in the room before leaving in frustration or confusion. A regular student said of one such instance: "The enemy has been defeated; he has cleared out."

Noether showed a devotion to her subject and her students that extended beyond the academic day. Once, when the building was closed for a state holiday, she gathered the class on the steps outside, led them through the woods, and lectured at a local coffee house. Later, after she had been dismissed by the Third Reich, she invited students into her home to discuss their future plans and mathematical concepts.

Moscow
Noether taught at the Moscow State University during the winter of 1928–29In the winter of 1928–29 Noether accepted an invitation to Moscow State University, where she continued working with P. S. Alexandrov. In addition to carrying on with her research, she taught classes in abstract algebra and algebraic geometry. She worked with the topologists, Lev Pontryagin and Nikolai Chebotaryov, who later praised her contributions to the development of Galois theory.

Although politics was not central to her life, Noether took a keen interest in political matters and, according to Alexandrov, showed considerable support for the Russian Revolution (1917). She was especially happy to see Soviet advancements in the fields of science and mathematics, which she considered indicative of new opportunities made possible by the Bolshevik project. This attitude caused her problems in Germany, culminating in her eviction from a pension lodging building, after student leaders complained of living with "a Marxist-leaning Jewess".

Noether planned to return to Moscow, an effort for which she received support from Alexandrov. After she left Germany in 1933 he tried to help her gain a chair at Moscow State University through the Soviet Education Ministry. Although this effort proved unsuccessful, they corresponded frequently during the 1930s, and in 1935 she made plans for a return to the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile her brother, Fritz accepted a position at the Research Institute for Mathematics and Mechanics in Tomsk, in the Siberian Federal District of Russia, after losing his job in Germany.

Recognition
In 1932 Emmy Noether and Emil Artin received the Ackermann–Teubner Memorial Award for their contributions to mathematics.

The prize carried a monetary reward of 500 Reichsmarks and was seen as a long-overdue official recognition of her considerable work in the field. Nevertheless, her colleagues expressed frustration at the fact that she was not elected to the Göttingen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften (academy of sciences) and was never promoted to the position of Ordentlicher Professor (full professor).

Noether visited Zürich in 1932 to deliver a plenary address at the International Congress of MathematiciansNoether's colleagues celebrated her fiftieth birthday in 1932, in typical mathematicians' style. Helmut Hasse dedicated an article to her in the Mathematische Annalen, wherein he confirmed her suspicion that some aspects of noncommutative algebra are simpler than those of commutative algebra, by proving a noncommutative reciprocity law.

This pleased her immensely. He also sent her a mathematical riddle, the "mμν-riddle of syllables", which she solved immediately; the riddle has been lost.

In September of the same year, Noether delivered a plenary address (großer Vortrag) on "Hyper-complex systems in their relations to commutative algebra and to number theory" at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich. The congress was attended by 800 people, including Noether's colleagues Hermann Weyl, Edmund Landau, and Wolfgang Krull. There were 420 official participants and twenty-one plenary addresses presented. Apparently, Noether's prominent speaking position was a recognition of the importance of her contributions to mathematics. The 1932 congress is sometimes described as the high point of her career.

Expulsion from Göttingen
When Adolf Hitler became the German Reichskanzler in January 1933, Nazi activity around the country increased dramatically. At the University of Göttingen the German Student Association led the attack on the "un-German spirit" and was aided by a privatdozent named Werner Weber, a former student of Emmy Noether. Antisemitic attitudes created a climate hostile to Jewish professors. One young protester reportedly demanded: "Aryan students want Aryan mathematics and not Jewish mathematics."

One of the first actions of Hitler's administration was the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service which removed Jews and politically suspect government employees (including university professors) from their jobs unless they had "demonstrated their loyalty to Germany" by serving in World War I. In April 1933 Noether received a notice from the Prussian Ministry for Sciences, Art, and Public Education which read: "On the basis of paragraph 3 of the Civil Service Code of 7 April 1933, I hereby withdraw from you the right to teach at the University of Göttingen."

Several of Noether's colleagues, including Max Born and Richard Courant, had their positions revoked.

Noether accepted the decision calmly, providing support for others during this difficult time. Hermann Weyl later wrote that "Emmy Noether—her courage, her frankness, her unconcern about her own fate, her conciliatory spirit—was in the midst of all the hatred and meanness, despair and sorrow surrounding us, a moral solace."

Typically, Noether remained focused on mathematics, gathering students in her apartment to discuss class field theory. When one of her students appeared in the uniform of the Nazi paramilitary organization Sturmabteilung (SA), she showed no sign of agitation and, reportedly, even laughed about it later.

Bryn Mawr
Bryn Mawr College provided a welcoming home for Noether during the last two years of her lifeAs dozens of newly unemployed professors began searching for positions outside of Germany, their colleagues in the United States sought to provide assistance and job opportunities for them. Albert Einstein and Hermann Weyl were appointed by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, while others worked to find a sponsor required for legal immigration. Noether was contacted by representatives of two educational institutions, Bryn Mawr College in the United States and Somerville College at the University of Oxford in England. After a series of negotiations with the Rockefeller Foundation, a grant to Bryn Mawr was approved for Noether and she took a position there, starting in late 1933.

At Bryn Mawr, Noether met and befriended Anna Wheeler, who had studied at Göttingen just before Noether arrived there. Another source of support at the college was the Bryn Mawr president, Marion Edwards Park, who enthusiastically invited mathematicians in the area to "see Dr. Noether in action!" Noether and a small team of students worked quickly through van der Waerden's 1930 book Moderne Algebra I and parts of Erich Hecke's Theorie der algebraischen Zahlen (Theory of algebraic numbers, 1908).

In 1934, Noether began lecturing at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton upon the invitation of Abraham Flexner and Oswald Veblen. She also worked with and supervised Abraham Albert and Harry Vandiver. However, she remarked about Princeton University that she was not welcome at the "men's university, where nothing female is admitted".

Her time in the United States was pleasant, surrounded as she was by supportive colleagues and absorbed in her favorite subjects. In the summer of 1934 she briefly returned to Germany to see Emil Artin and her brother Fritz before he left for Tomsk. Although many of her former colleagues had been forced out of the universities, she was able to use the library as a "foreign scholar".

Death
Noether's remains were placed under the walkway surrounding the cloisters of Bryn Mawr's M. Carey Thomas LibraryIn April 1935 doctors discovered a tumor in Noether's pelvis. Worried about complications from surgery, they ordered two days of bed rest first. During the operation they discovered an ovarian cyst "the size of a large cantaloupe".

Two smaller tumors in her uterus appeared to be benign and were not removed, to avoid prolonging surgery. For three days she appeared to convalesce normally, and recovered quickly from a circulatory collapse on the fourth. On 14 April, she fell unconscious, her temperature soared to 109 °F (42.8 °C), and she died. "[I]t is not easy to say what had occurred in Dr. Noether", one of the physicians wrote. "It is possible that there was some form of unusual and virulent infection, which struck the base of the brain where the heat centers are supposed to be located."

A few days after Noether's death her friends and associates at Bryn Mawr held a small memorial service at President Park's house. Hermann Weyl and Richard Brauer traveled from Princeton and spoke with Wheeler and Taussky about their departed colleague. In the months which followed, written tributes began to appear around the globe: Albert Einstein joined van der Waerden, Weyl, and Pavel Alexandrov in paying their respects. Her body was cremated and the ashes interred under the walkway around the cloisters of the M. Carey Thomas Library at Bryn Mawr.

Contributions to mathematics and physics
First and foremost Noether is remembered by mathematicians as an algebraist and for her work in topology. Physicists appreciate her best for her famous theorem because of its far-ranging consequences for the study of subatomic particles and dynamic systems. She showed an acute propensity for abstract thought, which allowed her to approach problems of mathematics in fresh and original ways.

Her friend and colleague Hermann Weyl described her scholarly output in three epochs:

"Emmy Noether’s scientific production fell into three clearly distinct epochs:
(1) the period of relative dependence, 1907–1919;
(2) the investigations grouped around the general theory of ideals 1920–1926;
(3) the study of the non-commutative algebras, their representations by linear transformations, and their application to the study of commutative number fields and their arithmetics." (Weyl 1935)

In the first epoch (1907–19), Noether dealt primarily with differential and algebraic invariants, beginning with her dissertation under Paul Albert Gordan. Her mathematical horizons broadened, and her work became more general and abstract, as she became acquainted with the work of David Hilbert, through close interactions with a successor to Gordan, Ernst Sigismund Fischer. After moving to Göttingen in 1915, she produced her seminal work for physics, the two Noether's theorems.

In the second epoch (1920–26), Noether devoted herself to developing the theory of mathematical rings.

In the third epoch (1927–35), Noether focused on noncommutative algebra, linear transformations, and commutative number fields.

Helen M. Berman (born 1943) is the director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank- one of the member organizations of the World Wide Protein Data Bank and a Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University. A structural biologist, her work includes structural analysis of protein-nucleic acid complexes, and the role of water in molecular interactions. She is also the founder and director of the Nucleic Acid Database, and leads the Protein Structure Initiative Structural Genomics Knowledgebase.

Biography
Background and education
Berman was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Her father, David Bernstein, was a physician and her mother, Dorothy Bernstein (née Skupsky), managed her father's office practice. Inspired by her hard-working and scholarly father, she was interested in science as a young girl and planned to become a scientist or doctor. Her mother, who was strongly involved in the community and volunteer work, influenced her to be involved in community activities throughout her life.

During high school, Berman worked in Ingrith Deyrup's laboratory at Barnard College. Deyrup encouraged Berman to attend Barnard as an undergraduate. While at college, she worked in a Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons laboratory with Barbara Low. There, Berman learned about crystallography, which would become a lifelong passion She graduated from Barnard with an A.B. in chemistry in 1964.

Following college, Berman attended the University of Pittsburgh, which she selected because it was the only place in the country with a crystallography department, and one of the few where crystallography was offered as a subject. There she worked with George A. Jeffrey on carbohydrate structure. She attained her Ph.D. in 1967, and remained at the University of Pittsburgh for two more years as a postdoctoral fellow.

Professional career
In 1969, Berman moved to the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, where she worked in Jenny P. Glusker's laboratory before starting her own independent research program as a faculty member in 1973. At Fox Chase, Berman became interested in nucleic acid structures and in bioinformatics. She knew that logical organization of data would make it useful to a variety of scientists.

In June 1971, Berman attended a symposium at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where several scientists agreed that data on the expanding number of protein structures should be archived in a database.

That meeting led to the creation of the Protein Data Bank (PDB) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

In 1989, Berman moved to Rutgers. In 1992, along with other scientists, she founded the Nucleic Acid Database to collect and disseminate information about nucleic acid structure.

At Rutgers, she continued to study nucleic acids, their interactions with proteins, and also researched the structure of collagen in collaboration with Barbara Brodsky and Jordi Bella.

In 1998, Berman competed for and won the contract for the Protein Data Bank and the database moved from Brookhaven to the auspices of the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics, currently a collaboration between Rutgers and the University of California, San Diego. With colleagues, Berman redesigned the data management system, added new user tools, and made the database searchable.

Since 2003, the PDB archive has been managed by the worldwide Protein Data Bank, a partnernship founded by Berman that consists of organizations that act as deposition, data processing and distribution centers for PDB data.

As of October, 2008, the PDB holds more than 53,000 structures. Also led by Berman, the Protein Structure Initiative (PSI) Structural Genomics Knowledgebase was launched in the Spring of 2008 to provide a continuously updated portal to research data and other resources from the PSI efforts.

Berman has also been active in the scientific community, serving as president of the American Crystallographic Association in 1988, advising both the National Institutes of Health and the National Scientific Foundation, and serving on the editorial board of several journals.

Personal
Berman has been married twice, to engineer Victor Berman in the 1960s, and to molecular biologist Peter Young from 1976 to 1999. From the second marriage she has a son, Jason Asher Young (born 1979), a physicist.

During the 1980s, Berman was diagnosed with breast cancer. The experience made her more focused in her life and her career, and interested in supporting other women who face the same diagnosis.

Esther Lederberg (1922-2006)

December 18, 1922 - November 11, 2006) was an American microbiologist and immunologist and pioneer of bacterial genetics. Notable contributions include the discovery of lambda phage, the relationship between transduction and lambda phage lysogeny, the development of replica plating, and discovery of bacterial fertility factor F.

Lederberg also founded and directed the Plasmid Reference Center at Stanford University, whose collection contained plasmids of all types of genes, coding for antibiotic resistance, heavy metal resistance, virulence, conjugation, colicins, transposons, temperature sensitivity and other unknown factors. (Most of these plasmids have still not been thoroughly studied.)

Early years
Esther Miriam Zimmer was the first of two children born in the Bronx, N.Y. to David Zimmer and Pauline Geller Zimmer. (A brother, Benjamin Zimmer, followed in 1923.) A child of the Great Depression, her lunch was often a piece of bread topped by the juice of a squeezed tomato.

Zimmer thrived academically. She attended Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, receiving honors for French and graduating at the age of 16. As an undergraduate, Zimmer worked at the New York Botanical Garden, engaging in research on Neurospora crassa with Bernard Ogilvie Dodge.

She received an A.B. at New York City’s Hunter College, graduating cum laude in 1942, at the age of 20.

After her graduation from Hunter, Zimmer went to work for the Carnegie Institution of Washington (later Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) as a research assistant to Alexander Hollaender, with whom she worked on neurospora crassa as well as publishing her first work in bacterial genetics.

In 1944 she won a fellowship to Stanford University, working as an assistant to George Wells Beadle. She traveled west to California, and after a summer studying at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station under Cornelius Van Niel, she entered a master’s program in genetics. While at Stanford she worked with Edward Lawrie Tatum of Yale on bacterial genetics.

(Note: Tatum and George Beadle later split the 1958 Nobel Prize with her then-husband, Joshua Lederberg.) Stanford awarded her a Master of Arts in 1946.

She married Joshua Lederberg on December 13, 1946, after which she began work on her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin. (Her thesis was "Genetic control of mutability in the bacterium Escherichia coli.") Joshua Lederberg accepted a position there as Associate Professor. She completed her doctorate under the sponsorship of R. A. Brink, in 1950: the same year that she discovered the lysogenicity of lambda bacteriophage.

Professional pioneers
Esther Lederberg attended the celebrated Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Symposia on genetics during the late 1940s and 50's, as well as later years.

Lederberg influenced and was influenced by many colleagues and friends.

Contributions to microbiology and genetics
Lederberg remained at the University of Wisconsin for most of the 1950s. It was there that she discovered lambda phage, did early research on the relationship between transduction and lambda phage lysogeny, discovered bacterial fertility factor F (eventually publishing with Joshua Lederberg and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza), and devised the first successful implementation of replica plating. These four contributions laid the foundation for much of the genetics work done in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Lambda bacteriophage and transduction
Esther Lederberg was the first to isolate lambda bacteriophage, a DNA virus, from Escherichia coli K-12 in 1950.

Lambda phage genetic material consists of a double-stranded DNA molecule with 5' twelve-base-pair sticky ends (cos sites), which permit circularization of the DNA molecule. It shows a lytic cycle and a lysogenic cycle. Studies on the control of these alternative cycles have been very important for our understanding of the regulation of gene transcription. (The mechanism of integration of lambda DNA into bacterial DNA was first worked out by Esther's colleague and close friend, Allan Campbell, in 1962.

Lambda phage is considered a 'temperate bacteriophage': one whose genome incorporates with and replicates with that of the host bacterium. Uses for lambda include its application as a vector for the cloning of recombinant DNA; the use of its site-specific recombinase, int, for the shuffling of cloned DNAs by the 'Gateway' method; and the application of its Red operon, including the proteins Red alpha (also called 'exo'), beta, and gamma, in the DNA engineering method called recombineering.

Her 1950 lambda phage paper led to an understanding of transduction, which is important not only in explaining the transfer of bacterial resistance, but provides a major mechanism that can explain modes of evolution.

The intimate relationship between transduction and lambda phage lysogeny was a consequence of this work.

A permanent exhibit in the "DNAtrium" of The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology honors Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg as the discoverer of lambda phage.

Bacterial Fertility Factor F
The Fertility Factor (also known as F Factor) is a bacterial DNA sequence that allows a bacterium to produce a sex pilus necessary for conjugation. The sequence contains 20 tra (for "transfer") genes and a number of other genetic sequences responsible for incompatibility, replication, and other functions. The F Factor is an episome, and can either exist as an independent plasmid or integrate into the bacterial cell's genome.

Esther Lederberg's discovery of F stemmed directly from her discovery of lambda as unexpected plaques on 'lac indicator agar' in the course of experiments on other material. In her own words:

In terms of testing available markers ... the data showed that there was a specific locus for lysogenicity. ... I explored the notion that there was some sort of 'fertility factor' which if absent, resulted in no recombinants. For short, I named this F.

Replica plating
Although there were other less efficient forerunners to the methodology (such as paper, or multipronged arrays using wire brushes, toothpicks, etc.), the problem of reproducing bacterial colonies en masse in the same geometric configuration as on original agar plate was first successfully solved by replica plating, as implemented by Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg.

Anecdotal credit is generally given to Joshua Lederberg for originating the idea of replica plating, but scientists had been struggling for a reliable solution for at least a decade before Esther Lederberg finally implemented it successfully.

Allan Campbell, Eugene Nester and Stanley Falkow all recount how Esther Lederberg provided them with the technical information necessary to successfully use this new methodology. From Alan Campbell:

Who successfully implemented the technique? Here Esther at least refined the process considerably. I remember (from her and others) that she was the one who went to the fabrics store and selected velvet of the best thickness, pile, etc. to give the cleanest prints.

Eugene Nester said:

I wanted to respond to your question about replica plating and who really invented it. I think it will be very difficult to answer that question in a convincing way. That technique was developed before I ever knew the Lederbergs ... I do know that Esther in all likelihood was responsible for getting the technique to actually work. She emphasized to me how important it was to use a particular kind of Italian velvet (or was it velveteen actually), so in my own mind I believe she was the key person in taking the idea to actual practice.

In Falkow's case, this happened a few years after she first published the replica plating paper. At the memorial for Esther Lederberg, he spoke of the impact of replica plating, and his feelings upon meeting the originator of the technique:

It was brilliantly simple: creative discoveries often are. She thought of using ordinary velveteen from a yard goods store to serve as a kind of rubber stamp. The tiny fibers of the velveteen acted like hundreds of tiny inocculating needles. The pad was carefully kept in the same orientation and used to inocculate a series of agar plates containing different media containing antibiotics or supplemented with essential nutrients such as amino acids and vitamins. Esther and Joshua used this technique as an indirect selective method to prove the spontaneous origin of mutants with adaptive advantages. ...

All of these things foreshadowed our first meeting and I was appropriately in awe of her. I was just starting to use replica plating in my own work and Esther immediately told me what brand of velveteen to look for and to be sure to wash the velveteen before I used them and even what detergent to use to wash them.

Later contributions
Esther Lederberg returned to Stanford in 1959 with Joshua Lederberg. She remained at Stanford for the balance of her research career, founding and directing the Plasmid Reference Center (PRC) at the Stanford School of Medicine from 1976 to 1986.

At first, plasmids were of great interest due to their ability to confer inheritable resistance to antibiotics, thus were referred to as "R-Factors" or "R plasmids". As time passed, the nomenclature was changed to "Plasmids" (in general) to take into account other factors in addition to antibiotic resistance, such as genes for specific activity (gal, lac, ara, etc.) and temperature sensitivity.

The PRC coordinated closely with the members of the Plasmid Nomenclature Committee (Royston Clowes, Stanley N. Cohen, Rob Curtiss III, Naomi Datta, Stanley Falkow, and Richard P. Novick), assigning prefixes to plasmids, and numbers to Insertion Sequences and Transposons.

She retired from her position in the Stanford Department of Microbiology and Immunology in 1985, but continued to run the PRC for almost another full decade after that.

Professional challenges: gender discrimination
Stanley Falkow said of Esther Lederberg that "Experimentally and methodologically she was a genius in the lab." However, although Esther Lederberg was a pioneer research scientist, she faced significant challenges as a woman scientist in the 1950s and 1960s. These were exacerbated by her collaboration with then-husband Joshua Lederberg.

As Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza later wrote, “Dr. Esther Lederberg has enjoyed the privilege of working with a very famous husband. This has been at times also a setback, because inevitably she has not been credited with as much of the credit as she really deserved. I know that very few people, if any, have had the benefit of as valuable a co-worker as Joshua has had.” [10] However, Joshua Lederberg himself failed to mention Esther Lederberg’s name in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 1958. Unsurprising that despite the significant effect Esther Lederberg’s work had on twentieth-century microbiology, she was overshadowed by her husband's notoriety.

Esther Lederberg had to fight to gain a position on the Stanford faculty. Retained as a Senior Scientist, in 1974 she was forced to transition to a position as Adjunct Professor of Medical Microbiology “coterminous with research support.” [18] (Adjunct Professors are typically un-tenured.)

Allan Campbell noted the injustice of Stanford’s attitude toward women scientists in a letter of recommendation for Esther Lederberg, written in 1971: “I think she is a definite asset to the University and merits promotion according to the normal customs of your department (i.e., that your Committee on Women’s Promotions should recommend advancement on the same time schedule as a Committee of Men’s Promotions would advance a male scientist).“

Both in high school and as an undergraduate at Hunter College, her proficiency with languages (French, Spanish), earned her many awards; she also started a French Club newspaper. When Lederberg's instructors learned that she wanted to study science rather than languages, they exerted great effort to persuade her not to go into a field where a woman was not allowed to succeed, with the possible exception of botany. (In fact, her career in science started with three internships doing botanical research at the New York Botanical Garden with B. O. Dodge between 1941 and 1942. She researched heterokaryosis in Neurospora tetrasperma.) Lederberg felt that she should pursue her interests, genetics and microbiology.

Her situation was summed up best, and most publicly, upon Dr. Lederberg’s death in 2006. In his eulogy for Esther Lederberg, Stanley Falkow said that while preparing his remarks he had checked the internet and found “a suggested topic for a term paper to meet the requirements for a passing grade in a bioethics course in Pomona College."

He read:

’Martha Chase, Daisy Roulland-Dussoix, and Esther Lederberg are women who participated in important discoveries in science. Martha Chase showed that phage genetic material is DNA not protein. Daisy Dussoix discovered restriction enzymes, and Esther Lederberg invented replica plating. Yet each of these discoveries is often credited to the male member of the team (Al Hershey, Werner Arber, and Joshua Lederberg, respectively). Using the resources of the library (at least five sources), write a five page paper that examines how history of science has treated each discovery (generally by Hershey, Arber, and Josh Lederberg, who all received the Nobel prize) and include your own appraisal of how you might have reacted to the reward structure in each case.

The unnamed Professor who posed this question noted that ‘(This one is a challenge! Feel free to reflect in your paper on why it might be so hard to find relevant information.)"

Twenty-first century science historians are beginning to look back on the mid-twentieth century as a time when researchers made great strides in the sciences, but lagged far behind in the area of gender discrimination. For a look at how science historian Pnina Abir-Am highlights the accomplishments of Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg and other under-credited female scientists, see the Brandeis University web site "Scientific Legacies".

Other interests
Esther Lederberg had cultural interests that went well beyond science.

Music
A lifelong musician, Lederberg was a devotee of Early Music. She was one of the founding members of the Mid-Peninsula Recorder Orchestra (affiliated with the San Francisco Early Music Society) in 1962, serving as its president for several years. At the memorial held for Dr. Lederberg at Stanford University, Frederick Palmer, musical director of the Mid-Peninsula Recorder Orchestra, spoke of Esther’s joy in this music, and her dedication to the MPRO:

One of the frustrations of anyone directing a musical ensemble made up of volunteers is wondering who will show up for rehearsals and if all of the parts will be adequately covered. I never had to worry about Esther. Even after her health began to fail and she was required to use a walker, Esther seldom missed one of the orchestra's meetings, and she insisted on playing in the concerts that the orchestra presented despite her limited mobility.

Always conscious that much of Early Music was really dance music, Lederberg also studied Renaissance and Elizabethan dance.

She loved symphonic music, opera, and the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Literature
Esther's taste in literature was eclectic; her library included both classics and contemporary works by such authors as Gore Vidal, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Margaret Atwood. A scientist who could suspend disbelief enough to actually enjoy some 'science fiction', Esther nevertheless took issue with Michael Crichton's handling of the alien antagonist in his novel, "Andromeda Strain". Her second husband, Matthew Simon, recounts:

Esther commented that "Crichton never got it right." I asked her what she meant, and she replied that if an extraterrestrial life form were caught in an outer space probe and brought back to Earth, whatever would counteract it would with high probability be caught along with it in the same probe, because living things are always surrounded in their environment by those things that counteract it. "They should simply have looked in the same net," she said. "They would have found what they needed to control the alien life form."

Lederberg also loved the works of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, and belonged to societies devoted to studying and celebrating these two authors.

Botany and botanical gardens
Lederberg maintained a lifelong love of botany and botanical gardens. She encouraged the planting of indigenous plants such as poppies and lupins around the Stanford University campus, arguing that as well as being beautiful such plants would not need to be watered—an important consideration to a campus located in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has frequent droughts.

She married Joshua Lederberg in 1946; they divorced in 1966. She married Matthew Simon in 1993.

Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg died November 11, 2006, from pneumonia and congestive heart failure, at the age of 83.

Joan Steitz b. 1941

From Wikipedia:
Joan Argetsinger Steitz (born 26 January 1941) is a molecular biologist at Yale University, famed for her discoveries involving RNA, including ground-breaking insights such as that ribosomes interact with mRNA by complementary base pairing and that introns are spliced by snRNPs, small nuclear ribonucleoproteins which occur in eukaryotes (such as yeasts and humans).

Life and career
Steitz was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She grew up in Minnesota in the 1950s and 60s at a time when there were virtually no female role models in molecular biology. She attended the then all-girls Northrop College for high school.

She received her B.S. in chemistry from Antioch College, Ohio, (1963), where she first became interested in molecular biology at Alex Rich's MIT laboratory as an Antioch "coop" intern.

After completing her B.S., Steitz applied to medical school rather than graduate school since she knew of female medical doctors but not female scientists. She was accepted to Harvard Medical School, but having been excited by a summer working as a bench scientist in the laboratory of Joseph Gall at the University of Minnesota, she declined the invitation to Harvard Medical School and instead applied to Harvard's new program in biochemistry and molecular biology. There, she was the first female graduate student to join the laboratory of James D. Watson, with whom she first worked on bacteriophage RNA.

Steitz did her postdoc at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge (UK), where she interacted with Francis Crick, Sydney Brenner, and Mark Bretscher. At the MRC, Steitz focused on the question of how bacteria know where to start the "reading frame" on mRNA. In the process, Steitz discovered the exact sequences on mRNA at which bacterial ribosomes bind to produce proteins. In 1969 she published a seminal Nature paper showing the nucleotide sequence of the binding start points.

In 1970, Steitz joined the faculty at Yale. In 1975, she published the research for which she is most famous, demonstrating that ribosomes use complementary base pairing to identify the start site on mRNA.

In 1980, Steitz published another critical paper, identifying the novel entity snRNPs and their role in splicing. A snRNP is a short length of RNA, around 150 nucleotides long, that are involved in splicing introns from newly transcribed RNA (pre-mRNA) -- spliceosomes. Steitz's paper "set the field ahead by light years and heralded the avalanche of small RNAs that have since been disocvered to play a role in multiple steps in RNA biosynthesis," noted Susan Berget.

Steitz later discovered another kind of snRNP particle, the snoRNP, demonstrating conclusively that introns are not "junk DNA" as they had often been described. Her work helps explain the phenomenon of "alternative RNA splicing." Part of the reason her discovery is so important is that it explains how humans are able to have only double the number of genes of a fly. "The reason we can get away with so few genes is that when you have these bits of nonsense, you can splice them out in different ways," she said. "Sometimes you can get rid of things and add things because of this splicing process so that each gene has slightly different protein products that can do slightly different things. So it multiplies up the information content in each of our genes."

Steitz's research may yield new insights into the diagnosis and treatment of autoimmune disorders such as lupus, which develop when patients make antibodies against their own DNA, snRNPs, or ribosomes.

Steitz has commented on the sexist treatment of women in science, noting that a woman scientist needs to be twice as good for half the pay. She has been a "tireless promoter of women in science," noted Christine Guthrie, who described Steitz as "one of the greatest scientists of our generation."

Steitz has served in numerous professional capacities, including as scientific director of the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research (1991-2002) and as editorial board member of Genes and Development.

Steitz (then Joan Argetsinger) married Thomas Steitz, now also a professor of biophysics and biochemistry at Yale and the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in 1966. They have one son who played baseball with the Milwaukee Brewers for three years and then entered Yale Law School.

Gertrude Goldhaber (1911-1998)

From Wikipedia:

Gertrude Scharff was born in Mannheim, Germany on July 14, 1911.[1] Goldhaber attended public school, and it is there that she developed an interested in science. Unusual for the time, her parents supported this interest — possibly because her father had wanted to be a chemist before being forced to support his family with the death of his father.

Goldhaber's early life was filled with hardship. During World War I she recalled having to eat bread made partially of sawdust, and her family suffered through the hyperinflation of postwar Germany, although it did not prevent her from attending the University of Munich.

Studying at the University of Munich
At the University of Munich Goldhaber quickly developed an interest in physics. Although her family had supported her early interested in science, her father encouraged her to study law at Munich. In defense of her decision to study physics Goldhaber told her father, “I’m not interested in the law. I want to understand what the world is made of.”

As was usual for students at the time, Goldhaber spent semesters at various other universities including the University of Freiburg, the University of Zurich, and the University of Berlin (where she would meet her future husband) before returning to the University of Munich. Upon returning to Munich Goldhaber took up a position with Walter Gerlach to perform her thesis research. In her thesis Goldhaber studied the effects of stress on magnetization. She graduated in 1935 and published her thesis in 1936.

With the rise to power of the Nazi party in 1933, Goldhaber faced increasing difficulties in Germany because of her Jewish heritage. During this time her father was arrested and jailed, and although he and his wife were able to flee to Switzerland upon his release, they later returned to Germany and perished in the The Holocaust. Goldhaber remained in Germany until the completion of her Ph.D. in 1935, at which point she fled to London. Although Goldhaber's parents did not escape the Nazis her sister Liselotte did.

Later life
For the first six months of her stay in London, Goldhaber lived off the money she made from selling her Leica camera, as well as money earned from translating from German to English. Goldhaber found that having a Ph.D. was a disadvantage as there were more spots for refugee students than for refugee scientists. She wrote to 35 other refugee scientists looking for work, and was told by all but one that there were already too many refugee scientists already working.

Only Maurice Goldhaber wrote back offering any hope, stating that he thought she might be able to find work in Cambridge. Goldhaber was able to find work in George Paget Thomson's lab working on electron diffraction.[7] Although she had a post-doc position with Thomson, Goldhaber realized that she wasn't going to be offered a real position with him and so looked for other work.

In 1939 Gertrude married Maurice Goldhaber. She then moved to Urbana, Illinois to join him at the University of Illinois. The state of Illinois had strict anti-nepotism laws at the time which prevented Gertrude Goldhaber from being hired by the university because her husband already had a position there. Goldhaber was granted neither salary nor laboratory space, and had so was forced to work in Maurice's lab as an unpaid assistant.

Since Maurice's lab was only set up for nuclear physics research, Gertrude Goldhaber was forced to take up research in that field as well. During this time Gertrude and Maurice Goldhaber had two sons: Alfred and Michael. Goldhaber was eventually given a soft-money line by the department to help support her research.

Goldhaber studied neutron-proton and neutron-nucleus reaction cross sections in 1941, and gamma radiation emission and absorption by nuclei in 1942. Around this time she also observed that spontaneous nuclear fission is accompanied by the release of neutrons — a result that had be theorized earlier but had yet to be shown. Her work with spontaneous nuclear fission was classified during the war, and was only published after the war ended in 1946.

Gertrude and Maurice Goldhaber moved from Illinois to Long Island where they both joined the staff of Brookhaven National Laboratory. At the laboratory she founded a series of monthly lectures known as the Brookhaven Lecture Series which is still continuing as of June 17, 2009.

Marcia Neugebauer (1932)

Marcia Neugebauer (born September 27, 1932) is a prominent American geophysicist who made important contributions to space physics. Neugebauer's pioneering research yielded the first direct measurements of the solar wind and shed light on its physics and interaction with comets.

Neugebauer was a primary investigator of the Mariner 2 plasma analyzer that made the first extensive measurements of the solar wind and discovery of its properties. She also developed analytical instruments that orbited Earth, some set up on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, and others that flew by Halley's comet on the European Giotto mission.

Neugebauer was Study Scientist for many space missions during her long career with NASA, and held several management positions at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, including Manager of the Physics and Space Physics sections, Manager of the Mariner Mark II study team, and Project Scientist for Rangers 1 and 2 and the Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby mission.

In 1967 the Museum of Science and Industry named Neugebauer "California Woman Scientist of the Year." She received many awards from NASA, including the Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award, the Outstanding Leadership Medal, and the Distinguished Service Medal (the highest award given by NASA).

Neugebauer served as president of the American Geophysical Union and was Editor-in-Chief of its journal Reviews of Geophysics. She also chaired the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Solar and Space Physics.

Neugebauer was born in New York City. She received a B.A. in physics from Cornell University in 1954, followed by an M.S. in physics from the University of Illinois in Urbana in 1956. She was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Physics in 1998 by the University of New Hampshire.

She is married to Gerry Neugebauer.

Biography: Zhang Xiaowen (b. 1935)

Not a lot of information on Zhang Xiaowen at Wikipedia, but I share it here:

Zhang Xiaowen, b 1935, is a Chinese material scientist and educator. Zhang is former President of Tsinghua University.

Biography
Zhang was born in 1935 in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province. Zhang graduated (B.S.) from the Department of Mechanical Manufacture of Tsinghua University in 1957.

From 1980 to 1985, Zhang was an associate professor at Tsinghua. From 1983 to 1984, she was a visiting scholar in the United States at Lehigh University then at the University of California, Berkeley. Zhang was promoted to professor at Tsinghua in 1985. Zhang was former head of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Tsinghua University. Zhang was Vice-dean of Tsinghua's College of Science, then the Vice-president of Tsinghua University. Zhang was the President of Tsinghua from October 1988 to January 1994.

Zhang was also a former Vice-minister of the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China.

In 1995, Zhang received an honorary doctorate from the Osaka Institute of Technology, Japan.

Zhang was an expert on ceramic materials and chemical engineering. During his presidential office at Tsinghua, Zhang made significant contributions to the development of the university, and the university started readopting into a comprehensive university status instead of a technical institute.

Laura Bassi (1711-1778)

Biography from Wikipedia:
Laura Maria Caterina Bassi (31 October 1711 – 20 February 1778) was an Italian scientist, the first woman to officially teach at a university in Europe.

Biography
Born in Bologna into a wealthy family with a lawyer as a father, she was privately educated and tutored for seven years in her teens by Gaetano Tacconi. She came to the attention of Cardinal Prospero Lambertini who encouraged her in her scientific work.

She was appointed professor of anatomy in 1731 at the University of Bologna at the age of 21, was elected to the Academy of the Institute for Sciences in 1732 and the next year, in 1733, was given the chair of philosophy. Her teaching opportunities were restricted in her early years, giving only occasional lectures. In 1738 she married Giuseppe Veratti, a fellow academic with whom she had eight children (some sources say more). After this, she was able to lecture from home on a regular basis and successfully petitioned the University for more responsibility and a higher salary to allow her to purchase her own equipment.

She was mainly interested in Newtonian physics and taught courses on the subject for 28 years. She was one of the key figures in introducing Newton's ideas of physics and natural philosophy to Italy. She also carried out experiments of her own in all aspects of physics. In her lifetime she published 28 papers, the vast majority of these on physics and hydraulics, though she did not write any books.

In 1745 Lambertini (now Pope Benedict XIV) established an elite group of 25 scholars known as the Benedettini ('Benedictines', named after himself.) Bassi pressed hard to be appointed to this group, but there was a mixed reaction from the other academics with strong support from some but others taking a negative point of view. Ultimately Benedict did appoint her to the final position, the only woman in the group.

In 1776, at the age of 65, she was appointed to the chair in experimental physics by the Institute of Sciences, with her husband as a teaching assistant. Two years later she died having made physics into a lifelong career and broken a huge amount of ground for women in academic circles.

She was elected member of many literary societies and carried on an extensive correspondence with the most eminent European men of letters. She was well acquainted with classical literature, as well as with that of France and Italy.

Amanda Jones (1835-1914)

Amanda Jones (1835 – 1914) was an American woman scientist most noted for inventing a vacuum method of canning called the Jones Process.

Amanda Jones was born in East Bloomfield, New York, on October 19, 1835. Her family was not wealthy but valued education. They were very avid readers.

When Jones was eight years old, she believed that spirits helped her find a key she had lost, and thereafter she had an interest in Spiritualism. She had a dream three years later where her brother told her “When the time comes, I must go.” The family moved to Buffalo. During school, her brother died from a heart defect.

She contacted her brother and, from that point forward, believed spirit guides to be helping her make decisions. At age 15, she was a teacher and a high school student.

In the 1860s, Amanda Jones continued to publish poems. She then began working as an editor, and continued to consider herself in contact with spirits, who helped her make job decisions.

In 1872, she received a message from the spirits that told her to write to Cooley to find her destiny. She knew Cooley, but had no idea why she needed to write to him. Then the spirits suggested that canning could be done by removing the air and then replacing it with jelly or juice. She thought the idea sounded reasonable, but had never canned food in her life and had no knowledge of inventing. She contacted Cooley and they worked together to create the “Jones” process. They created the first model in 1873.

Amanda discovered that this method of canning added more flavor to the food, doesn’t remove any nutritional value, and it kills the bacteria by lack of oxygen instead of heat. Amanda Jones was asked to create a safe way to burn oil. Oil was becoming a valuable resource but it was very dangerous. If you burned oil to cook, you could get too little oil or too much. So, in 1880, she created the first automatic safety burner. She started the Women’s Canning and Preserving Company ten years later. The company allowed only women to join.

Three years later, they hired a group of men. The men took over the company and women were removed from the company. She died in 1914.

Maria Klenova (1898-1976)

Maria Vasilyevna Klenova (Russian: Мари́я Васи́льевна Клёнова) (1898–1976) was a Russian and Soviet marine geologist and one of the founders of Russian marine science.[1]

Klenova studied to become a professor and later on worked as a member of the Council for Antarctic Research of the USSR Academy of Sciences. During that time she spent nearly thirty years researching in the Polar Regions and become the first woman scientist to do research in Antarctica, specifically at the ANARE (Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions) station at Macquarie Island.

Career
Klenova began her marine geology career in 1925 as a researcher aboard the Soviet research vessel Persey, attached to the Floating Marine Research Institute in the Barents Sea and the archipelagos of Novaya Zemlya, Spitsbergen, and Franz Josef Land. In 1933 Klenova produced the first complete seabed map of the Barents Sea.

In 1949 Klenova became a senior research associate at the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Her work included analyses of seabed geology in the Atlantic Ocean and the Antarctic, and in the Caspian, Barents and White Seas. In the austral summer of 1956 she traveled with a Soviet oceanographic team to map uncharted areas of the Antarctic coast.

The Klenova Valley (84°36′N 55°00′W / 84.6°N 55°W / 84.6; -55), an oceanographic valley discovered in 1981–1983 by the USSR Northern Fleet Hydrographic Expedition is named after her. Klenova crater on Venus is also named in her honor.

Contributions
Her contributions helped to create the first Antarctic atlas, a groundbreaking four-volume work published in the Soviet Union. Dr. Klenova spent most of her time making observations on board the Russian icebreakers Ob and Lena. Her group took oceanographic measurements in Antarctic and sub-Antarctic waters.

Along with Klenova there were seven other women on board the Ob. At that time women were rarely allowed to venture on land and had to rely on their male colleagues to collect and bring back data samples. In between these two voyages she worked at Mirny, a Russian base on the Queen Mary Coast (which is shared by Australian and Polish Research Stations). On the way home Klenova went to Macquarie Island where she became the first female scientist ever to go ashore.

May Somerville: 1780-1872

Biography from Wikipedia:
Mary Fairfax Somerville (26 December 1780 – 28 November 1872) was a Scottish science writer and polymath, at a time when women's participation in science was discouraged. She studied mathematics and astronomy, and was the second woman scientist to receive recognition in the United Kingdom after Caroline Herschel.

She was the daughter of Admiral Sir William George Fairfax, and was born at the manse of Jedburgh, in the Borders, the house of her mother's sister, wife of Dr Thomas Somerville (1741–1830), author of My Own Life and Times. In 1804 she married her distant cousin, the Russian Consul in London, Captain Samuel Greig, son of Admiral Samuel Greig. They had two children before Greig died in 1807, one of whom, Woronzow Greig became a barrister and scientist.

After the death of her husband, she inherited money which gave her the freedom to pursue intellectual interests. In 1812 she married another cousin, Dr William Somerville (1771–1860), inspector of the Army Medical Board, who encouraged and greatly aided her in the study of the physical sciences. They had a further four children.

During her marriage she made the acquaintance of the most eminent scientific men of the time, among whom her talents had attracted attention before she had acquired general fame, Laplace told her "There have been only three women who have understood me. These are yourself, Mrs Somerville, Caroline Herschel and a Mrs Grieg of whom I know nothing." (Of course, Somerville was first and third of these three.)

Having been requested by Lord Brougham to translate for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge the Mécanique Céleste of Laplace, she greatly popularized its form, and its publication in 1831, under the title of The Mechanism of the Heavens, at once made her famous. She stated "I translated Laplace's work from algebra into common language".

Her other works are the On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), Physical Geography (1848), and Molecular and Microscopic Science (1869). In 1835, she and Caroline Herschel became the first women members of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 1838 she and her husband went to Italy, where she spent much of the rest of her life.

Much of the popularity of her writings was due to her clear and crisp style and the underlying enthusiasm for her subject which pervaded them. From 1835 she received a pension of £300 from government. In 1869 she was awarded the Victoria Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.

She died at Naples on 28 November 1872, and is buried there in the English Cemetery, Naples. In the following year there appeared her autobiographical Personal Recollections, consisting of reminiscences written during her old age, and of great interest both for what they reveal of her own character and life and the glimpses they afford of the literary and scientific society of bygone times. She also invented the commonly used variables from algebraic math.

Legacy
Somerville College, Oxford, was named after Mary Somerville, as is Somerville House, Burntisland, where she lived for a time. The term "scientist" was coined by William Whewell in an 1834 review of her On the Connexion of the Sciences.

Somerville Island, a small island in Barrow Strait, Nunavut, was named after her by Sir William Edward Parry in 1819 during the first of the four Arctic expeditions under his command.

5771 Somerville (1987 ST1) is a main-belt asteroid discovered on September 21, 1987 by E. Bowell at Lowell Observatory Flagstaff, Arizona, and named for her.

Somerville crater is a small lunar crater in the eastern part of the Moon. It lies to the east of the prominent crater Langrenus, and was designated Langrenus J before being given her name by the International Astronomical Union. It is one of a handful of lunar craters named after a woman.

Mom-daughter dive team find golden bird worth $885,000

WOAI.com: Mom-daughter dive team find golden bird worth $885,000
Okay, these women are scuba divers, not scientists, nevertheless I thought their story was interesting and share it here:

FT. PIERCE, Florida (NBC News Channel) -- Bonnie Schubert and her 87-year old mother have hunted treasure along Florida's coast for decades.

Most days they wind up digging dozens of holes, diving in the murky water, and coming up with a fishing lure or a beer can.

"I spent a whole season and only came up with a musket ball," says Bonnie.

But one day this August, the Schuberts were diving near Frederick Douglass Beach when they made the find of their lives.

"The first thing that came into focus was the head of the bird and the wing...and it was something I never imagined...just didn't expect at all.." recalls Bonnie.

They discovered a 22-carat solid gold bird, a relic which they believe dates back to the lost Spanish Fleet of 1715. The fleet of Spanish galleons wrecked near Ft. Pierce, littering the ocean floor with what divers believe to be millions of dollars in gold and jewels.

"It's truly been amazing. It's not something we could have ever predicted," said Brent Brisbane, a principal with 1715 Fleet-Queen's Jewels, LLC, the corporation that holds the rights to treasure hunting in the region.

Brisbane asked a local historian to study the relic and learned it is a "Pelican in her Piety," a symbol of Christ.

"It's a symbol of the sacrifice of Christ that the mother pelican would beat her breast and draw blood when times are bad," said Bonnie Schubert.

The golden bird is missing a wing and no one knows what it once held in its center, which is now a small square opening. Brisbane had the item appraised by Dubose and Sons Jewelers in Vero Beach.

"They came back with an appraisal of $885,000," said Brisbane.

Brisbane's teams have had a bountiful summer, uncovering dozens of gold and silver coins and a bronze canon from the wreck sites, but he says Bonnie and Jo's golden bird is clearly the biggest prize of all.

"Bonnie and Jo are amazing. This is a male-dominated industry and to have these two ladies come up with what is truly one of the top 5 artifacts ever found from the 1715 fleet is just incredible," he said.

Dividing the spoils could be the tricky part. As contractors, Bonnie and Jo typically get half of what they find. Brisbane, who holds the rights to treasure hunting in region, gives 20% to the state of Florida.

If the state decides it wants the golden bird, then Brisbane says there may be some "treasure trading" to make it all come out right.

Space science vocabulary

Burnout
The point when combustion ceases in a rocket engine.

Capsule
A small pressurized cabin with an acceptable environment, usually for containing a person or animal for extremely high-altitude flights, orbital space flight, or emergency escape.

Cavitation
The rapid formation and collapse of vapor pockets in a flowing liquid under very low pressures; a frequent cause of serious structural damage to rocket components.