New film Hidden Figures follows the incredible real-life story of three female black “human computers” who battled segregation and prejudice to work at Nasa, performing vital mathematical calculations in the 1960s. Here we look at 10 other incredible female mathematicians who battled disdain and discrimination to pursue their studies and make incredible discoveries…
1. Hypatia
The daughter of Greek mathematician Theon, Hypatia was head of the Platonist School in Alexandria, Egypt, where she taught astronomy and philosophy. Described as a woman of great intellect and dignity, religious zealots accused her of being a Satanist and murdered her in 415 AD. Though there are no written records, it’s believed she was a highly influential genius who contributed vastly to her famous father’s published texts.
2. Sophie Germain
Inspired by reading about Archimedes, 18th-century mathematician Marie-Sophie Germain pursued her obsession with number theory and calculus by assuming the identity of a former male student who had dropped out so she could study at a male-only maths academy in Paris. Sadly, her brilliant work on Fermat’s Last Theorem was never recognised – when she died she was listed as a “single woman with no profession”.
3. Caroline Herschel
The first woman to receive the Royal Astronomical Society’s gold medal in 1828, Herschel famously discovered seven new comets. After falling ill with typhus aged 10, the German mathematician never grew taller than four foot three and it was assumed she would never amount to much since she was unlikely to marry. However, when her astronomer brother William discovered the planet Uranus in 1781 she became his paid assistant, made numerous significant discoveries of her own and lived to the age of 97.
4. Ada Lovelace
Nicknamed “The Enchantress of Numbers”, Lovelace was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron, was a Victorian computer pioneer who collaborated with Charles Babbage on the first programmable computers in the mid-19th century. A visionary thinker, Lovelace foresaw how Babbage’s number machines could be used to translate any form of content into digits that could be manipulated by a machine. Her ideas were so far ahead of their time that they were only recognised in the 1950s – more than 100 years later.
5. Sofia Kovalevskaya
Born in Moscow in 1850, Kovalevskaya’s mathematical prowess was noticed by her uncle, who persuaded her begrudging father to let her take private lessons. The patriarchal times meant she was forced to enter a marriage of convenience to be free to travel to Germany, where she made important contributions to mathematical analysis. She finally became the first female to gain a northern European professorship after years of hostility from male peers.
6. Emmy Noether
When she died in 1935, Albert Einstein described Noether as the most creative and significant female maths genius of all time. In spite of her innovations in higher algebra, Noether endured years of snubs by German universities, who objected to a woman teaching and would only let her lecture under the name of a male colleague.
7. Florence Nightingale
After caring for soldiers in the Crimean War, Nightingale famously revolutionised the nursing profession, but her mathematical innovations are less well known. To present her case for better medical care to the UK government she developed a flair for statistics. She was among the first people to use circular diagrams as pictorial aids and invented a “polar area graph”, similar to a pie chart.
8. Joan Clarke
The only female code-breaker at Bletchley Park, Clarke worked alongside Alan Turing in the team that created the Enigma machine in order to break the code to the Nazi’s wartime communications. Though she later became head of that team, Clarke was paid less than the men and was prevented from progressing her career further because of her gender.
9. Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell
When she detected the first radio pulsar in the late 1960s, Bell Burnell made one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the century. But in 1974, her two male colleagues were awarded with the Nobel Prize for the finding, even though her name was second in the list of five authors of the winning paper – and she was first to observe and precisely analyse the neutron star.
10. Radia Perlman
Sometimes called the “mother of the internet”, Perlman became a leader in the field of computer science after graduating from MIT in the early 1970s. Perlman created the Spanning Tree Protocol algorithm that made the internet possible, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2016.
