Last year, during Women’s History Month, parishioner Penny Beer was inspired to paint a series on women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Her portraits of ten of these women, currently displayed in the Narthex, highlight their stories. Many women in STEM have made great contributions and been given little or no recognition.
Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)
Considered the first computer programmer, she translated an article on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, adding her own footnotes. In describing the machine, she wrote the first program, anticipating the machine’s use beyond numbers. The “ADA” programming language is named for her.
Nettie Maria Stevens 1904 (1861-1912)
Studying mealworms, Stevens, discovered sex chromosomes. She noted that males produced two kinds of sperm – one with a large chromosome and one with a small one. The large produced females; the small produced males. Her work was published in 1905. Although others have gone on to expand on her analysis she is not often credited with her original work.
Winifred Edgerton Merrill (1862-1951)
Merrill became the first American woman to earn a Ph.D. in Mathematics (Columbia University, 1886). After graduating with honors from Wellesley in 1882, she had to convince each Columbia University Trustee of her proficiency in mathematics to be accepted into the program. Presenting an original thesis, she received her Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1886.
Elise “Lise” Meitner (1878-1968)
In 1906, she became the second woman in Vienna to earn her doctorate in physics. While working on radioactivity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin, she discovered the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917. Meitner received many honors in her lifetime but did not receive the Nobel Prize although she co-discovered nuclear fission and coined the term fission.
Martha Euphemia Lofton Haynes (1890-1980)
After earning a mathematics degree from Smith College, she became the first African-American woman and ninth African-American to earn a Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1943 (Catholic University). She taught in the public schools of Washington, D.C. for 47 years, became the first woman to chair the DC Board of Education in 1966, and established the mathematics department at the University of District Columbia.
Evelyn Boyd Granville (1924-2023)
After graduating from Smith College, she became the second African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1949 (Yale University). where she conducted research and taught. Over the course of her career, Boyd worked at New York University Institute for Mathematics, at IBM as a programmer, at the Vanguard Computing Center, and at the U.S. Space Technology Laboratories.
Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920-1958)
A British chemist and X-ray crystallographer, her work was a major contribution to understanding the double helix in DNA. This work led to the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine granted to three men. Her work was unrecognized during her lifetime.
Betty Jean Jennings Bartik (1924-2011)
After achieving her Bachelor’s in mathematics, she worked at University of Pennsylvania manually calculating ballistics for the WWII effort and later using the ENIAC to do so. She and five other women (Betty Holberton, Marlyn Wescoff, Kathleen McNulty, Ruth Teitelbaum, and Frances Spence) were chosen to be the main programmers for the ENIAC. They learned how the machine was built and wired to figure out how to program it. They were known as the “Sensational Six.”
Grace Brewster Hopper (1906-1992)
During WWII, she was one of the first Harvard Mark 1 programmers. Hopper was the first to develop the theory of machine-independent programming languages and used this theory to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language and COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. She also wrote the first compiler. In 1983, this legendary computer scientist became one of the few women to attain the rank of Admiral.
Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017)
Mirzakhani was a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. On August 13, 2014, Mirzakhani was honored with the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, becoming the first woman to win the prize, as well as the first Iranian. Mirzakhani was considered a leading force in the fields of hyperbolic geometry, topology and dynamics.