Top Women Scientists

Mary Anning 1799 – 1847.
Ancient animals, fossils, and paleontology: discovered the first complete specimen of a plesiosaur; deduced the diets of dinosaurs.

Elizabeth Blackwell 1821 – 1910.
The first woman to qualify as a physician in America; founder of America’s first medical school for women.

Linda Buck Born 1947.
Co-discovered how our sense of smell works: humans have about 350 different types of odor receptor cell which send signals directly into the brain’s olfactory bulb.

Rachel Carson 1907 – 1964.
A founder of 20th century environmentalism, her book Silent Spring led to a reappraisal of the effect of chemicals such as DDT on the environment, leading to bans and heavy restrictions.

Marie Curie 1867 – 1934.
Co-discovered the chemical elements radium and polonium; made numerous pioneering contributions to the study of radioactive elements; carried out the first research into the treatment of tumors with radiation.

Rosalind Franklin 1920 – 1958.
Provided much of the experimental data used to establish the structure of DNA, and discovered that DNA can exist in two forms. Established that coal acts as a molecular sieve.

Elizebeth Smith Friedman 1892 – 1980.
Became the world’s most famous codebreaker in the 1930s; broke the Enigma code in the 1940s, revealing a Nazi plot to take over South America.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin 1900 – 1979.
Discovered that the most abundant chemical elements in stars and hence in the universe are hydrogen and helium.

Sophie Germain 1776 – 1831.
Self-taught mathematican who pretended she was a man. Developed elasticity theory and made significant progress in her personal program to prove Fermat’s last theorem.

Jane Goodall Born 1934.
Ground breaking discoveries in chimpanzee behavior; established that chimpanzees have similar social behavior to humans and also that they make tools, and eat and hunt for meat.

Caroline Herschel 1750 – 1848
Discovered five comets; produced award winning catalogue of nebulae; the brother-sister team of William & Caroline Herschel increased the number of known nebulae from about 100 to 2,500.

Grace Hopper 1906 – 1992.
Pioneer of electronic computers: invented the first compiler; was the principal architect of COBOL, the most widely used computer language of the twentieth century.

Hypatia c. 370 – 415 AD.
One of the most eminent mathematicians of late classical antiquity; scholars traveled from around the classical world to learn mathematics and astronomy at her school.

Irene Joliot-Curie 1897 – 1956.
Co-discovered how to convert stable chemical elements into ‘designer’ radioactive elements; these have saved millions of lives and are used in tens of millions of medical procedures every year.

Frances Kelsey 1914 – 2015.
In the early 1960s, thousands of children died or were born malformed because their mothers took the drug thalidomide during pregnancy. Few ‘thalidomide babies’ were born in the USA, largely because Frances Kelsey blocked American sales.

Stephanie Kwolek 1923 – 2014.
Invented kevlar, the incredibly strong plastic used in applications ranging from body armor to tennis racquet strings.

Henrietta Leavitt 1868 – 1921.
Discovered that Cepheid variable stars act as a ‘standard candle,’ opening the door to measuring the distances to far distant stars and the discovery of galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

Inge Lehmann 1888 – 1993.
Analyzed earthquake waves to discover that within our planet’s liquid core, at the earth’s center, there is a solid core whose diameter is greater than 1,000 km.

Ada Lovelace 1815 – 1852.
The mother of computing science; contributed to the first published computer program; was the first person to see that computers could do more than mathematical calculations, recognizing that musical notes and letters of the alphabet could be turned into numbers for manipulation by computers.

Jane Marcet 1769 – 1858.
Author of Conversations on Chemistry, a unique textbook for its time written for people with little formal education, such as girls and the poor. The book inspired Michael Faraday to overcome his poor origins to become a great scientist.

Barbara McClintock 1902 – 1992.
Groundbreaking genetics: showed that genes switch the physical traits of an organism on or off; discovered chromosomal crossover, which increases genetic variation in species; discovered transposition – that genes can move about within chromosomes.

Lise Meitner 1878 – 1968.
Discovered that nuclear fission can produce enormous amounts of energy; codiscovered the phenomenon of radioactive recoil.

Florence Nightingale 1820 – 1910.
A health pioneer who transformed nursing into a respected, highly trained profession; used statistics to analyze wider health outcomes; advocated sanitary reforms largely credited with adding 20 years to life expectancy between 1871 and 1935.

Emmy Noether 1882 – 1935.
Probably the greatest female mathematician in history, Noether’s theorem revealed a fundamental property of our universe, that for every conservation law there is an invariant. Her founding work in abstract algebra revolutionized mathematics.

Marguerite Perey 1909 – 1975.
Discovered francium, the last ever chemical element found naturally. All elements since have been produced artificially.

Mary Somerville 1780 – 1872.
Self-taught mathematician and polymath; bestselling popularizer of science; acclaimed for her translation and revision of Pierre Laplace’s groundbreaking book on celestial mechanics.

Nettie Stevens 1861 – 1912.
Discovered that an organism’s sex is determined by its chromosomes, now known as the XY sex-determination system – the discovery was the first time a link was demonstrated between a physical characteristic and chromosome differences.

Youyou Tu Born 1930.
Discovered the drug artemisinin, a treatment for malaria, extracting it from sweet wormwood, an herb utilized in Chinese fever treatments for more than 2,000 years. Artemisinin and its derivatives have saved or improved the lives of millions of people.