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The English Lit Major Who Cracked Nazi Codes
Known as “America’s first female cryptanalyst,” Elizebeth Smith Friedman was a master codebreaker who played a pivotal role in both world wars, but f…
2 years, 5 months ago
Who was Christine Essenberg? A remarkable zoologist almost lost to history
Christine Essenberg had an unusual life and an unusual career trajectory. She was married, then divorced, and earned her PhD in zoology from Universi…
2 years, 6 months ago
Dr. Sarah Loguen Fraser, an ex-slave’s daughter, becomes a celebrated doctor
Born in 1850, Sarah Loguen found her calling as a child, when she helped her parents and Harriet Tubman bandage the leg of an injured person escaping…
2 years, 6 months ago
A Flair for Efficiency: The Woman Who Redesigned the American Kitchen
In the late 1920s, Lillian Gilbreth enlisted her children — she had 11— in an experiment: bake a strawberry shortcake in record time. Kitchens at the…
2 years, 6 months ago
Part 2: Why Did Lise Meitner Never Receive the Nobel Prize for Splitting the Atom?
We continue the story of Jewish physicist Lise Meitner, the first person to understand that the atom had been split. This is the second in a two-part…
2 years, 6 months ago
Part 1: Why Did Lise Meitner Never Receive the Nobel Prize for Splitting the Atom?
New translations of hundreds of letters explain, in a two-part episode of Lost Women of Science, why physicist Lise Meitner was not awarded the Nobel…
2 years, 6 months ago
They Remembered the Lost Women of the Manhattan Project So That We Wouldn't Forget
In the early 1990s, two physicists, Ruth Howes and Caroline Herzenberg, began looking into a question that had aroused their curiosity: Just who were…
2 years, 7 months ago
Meet the Physicist who Spoke Out Against the Bomb She Helped Create
Katharine “Kay” Way was a nuclear physicist who worked at multiple Manhattan Project sites. She was an expert in radioactive decay. But after the ato…
2 years, 7 months ago
The Story of the Real Lilli Hornig, the Only Female Scientist Named in the Film Oppenheimer
Lilli Hornig was only 23 years old when she arrived at Los Alamos to contribute to the development of an atomic bomb that would end World War II. A t…
2 years, 7 months ago
No Place for a Woman in Mathematics? The Woman Who Ended up Supervising The Computations that Proved an Atomic Bomb Would Work
Naomi Livesay, born in 1916 in the northern reaches of Montana, aspired to one career: mathematics. She earned a bachelor’s degree in math, but when …
2 years, 8 months ago