Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson is an American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics as a NASA employee were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights. Johnson exhibited exceptional technical leadership and is known...
Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, co-discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. She is credited with “one of the most significant scientific achievements of the 20th century”. The...
Chien-Shiung Wu was born in China, but at the recommendation of one of her supervisors, she set off for the US in 1936 to attend the University of Michigan for her Ph.D in nuclear physics. However, when she learned that women weren’t allowed to use the front entrance...
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist who proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, and established that stars could be classified according to their temperatures. Her...
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, born Augusta Ada Byron and now commonly known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her...
