TEAM ELEV8: FORGOTTEN WOMEN OF STEM

Ada Lovelace: 

“Who is known as the father of computers?” 
This popular trivia, referring to Charles Babbage, dominates computer science quizzes, and yet, little respect is paid to Ada Lovelace, the mother of programming.

English mathematician and writer, Ada Lovelace helped revolutionize the trajectory of the computer industry. She was the first to recognize that Charles Babbage’s ‘Analytical Engine’ had a much larger potential than mathematical calculation. She hypothesized that his programming could work with other things besides numbers. The idea of a machine that could manipulate symbols according to rules, marked the important transition from calculation to computation, effectively making her the first person to conceptualize a computer. She later worked with Charles Babbage to bring this vision to life and wrote the world’s first computer program.

Her ideas were first published in the form of comments written on an article she was translating from French to English on the machine in 1843. Unfortunately, she passed away at the young age of 36 and her contributions to technology weren’t known until a century after her death, especially since mathematics and engineering were not considered appropriate professions for women. 

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin:


Rivalling Shakespeare’s tragedies, the story of British-born American astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin is riddled with hardship. 
Having witnessed the lack of opportunity in England for women in STEM at the time, she pursued a fellowship at Harvard in 1923. In her PhD thesis, she definitively established that stars are composed mostly of hydrogen and helium. However, she was dissuaded from this remarkable conclusion by astronomer Henry Norris Russell, who thought that stars would have the same composition as Earth. (Russell conceded in 1929 that Payne was correct.) 


Despite her remarkable research Harvard refused to grant a doctoral degree to women, thus she obtained her PhD from Radcliffe College. Payne remained at Harvard as a technical assistant after completing her doctorate where director Harlow Shapley had her discontinue her work with stellar spectra and encouraged her instead to work on photometry of stars by using photographic plates (an outdated and inaccurate set of instruments). She was named a lecturer in astronomy in 1938, but even though she taught courses, they were not listed in the Harvard catalogue until after World War II.

Rosalind Franklin:  

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 was awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, a discovery for which the foundation was already previously laid by Rosalind Franklin. A brilliant scientist of British origin, Rosalind received no awards for her discovery of the helical structure of DNA and RNA, with the excuse that honors like the Nobel Prize are not awarded posthumously. 

When she began her research at King’s College she discovered the density of DNA and established that the molecule existed in a helical conformation. She collaborated on studies showing that the ribonucleic acid (RNA) in that virus was embedded in its protein rather than in its central cavity and that this RNA was a single-strand helix. She also studied the chemistry of coal and carbon for the war effort, bringing forth information that proved valuable to the coking industry, 


All in all, Rosalind Franklin was a brilliant chemist and researcher that went unrecognized by the globe for her efforts for several decades after her death, and today, it becomes our responsibility to honor and spread the word, about women like Rosalind, that dedicated their lives to the advancement of science and technology.

By FRC Team 7539 Elev8 from Mumbai, India

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