---
title: "List of inventions and discoveries by women"
chunk: 2/8
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventions_and_discoveries_by_women"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:51:34.164784+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Chien-Shiung Wu was the first scientist to confirm Enrico Fermi’s theory of radioactive beta decay. She also overturned the theory of parity in physics.
Radon
In 1901, Harriet Brooks and Ernest Rutherford contributed to the discovery of the element radon by finding evidence that the "emanation" emitted by thorium compounds was likely to be a gas. This follows work in 1899 by Pierre and Marie Curie, who observed that the gas emitted by radium remained radioactive for a month.
Kinetic energy
Emilie du Châtelet (born Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil) translated Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica from Latin to French during the 18th century. She carried out physics experiments, popularizing the work of Leibniz. She demonstrated that the kinetic energy of an object was proportional to its mass and the square of its velocity, and postulated a conservation law for the total energy of a system.
Heavy elements in cosmic radiation
As a graduate student, Phyllis S. Freier found evidence for the existence of elements heavier than helium in cosmic radiation. Her work was published in Physical Review in 1948 with co-authors Edward J. Lofgren, Edward P. Ney, and Frank Oppenheimer.
Beta particles are electrons.
Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber and her husband Maurice Goldhaber showed that beta particles were identical to electrons.
Top quark
Melissa Franklin's team at Fermilab found some of the first evidence for the existence of the top quark.
Nuclear shell
Maria Goeppert Mayer, a German immigrant to the US who studied at Johns Hopkins during the Great Depression, persisted in her studies even when no university would employ her and became a chemical physicist. Her most-famous contribution to modern physics was discovering the nuclear shell of the atomic nucleus, for which she won the Nobel Prize in 1963.
Slow light
Lene Hau led a Harvard University team who used a Bose–Einstein condensate to slow down a beam of light to about 17 metres per second, and, in 2001, was able to stop a beam completely.
Astatine
The Austrian physicist Berta Karlik discovered that the element 85 astatine is a product of the natural decay processes.
Bohr–van Leeuwen theorem
In her 1919 thesis, Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen explained why magnetism is an essentially quantum mechanical effect, a result now referred to as the Bohr–van Leeuwen theorem. (Niels Bohr had arrived at the same conclusion a few years earlier.)
Francium
In 1939, Marguerite Perey, a student of Marie Curie, discovered the element francium by purifying samples of lanthanum that contained actinium.  Perey first noticed that the actinium she purified was emitting unexpected radiation. After further study she was able to isolate this new element which she named "francium" for France.
Nuclear fission
Austrian–Swedish physicist Lise Meitner, together with Otto Hahn and Otto Robert Frisch, led the small group of scientists who first discovered nuclear fission of uranium when it absorbed an extra neutron.  The results were published in early 1939. Meitner, Hahn and Frisch understood that the fission process, which splits the atomic nucleus of uranium into two smaller nuclei, must be accompanied by an enormous release of energy. Nuclear fission is the process exploited by nuclear reactors to generate heat and, subsequently, electricity. This process is also one of the basics of nuclear weapons that were developed in the U.S. during World War II and used against Japan in 1945.
Structure of the Milky Way
Heidi Jo Newberg's team found that Milky Way is cannibalizing stars from smaller galaxies and that the Milky Way is larger and has more ripples than was previously understood.
Chirped pulse amplification
Donna Strickland received the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of chirped pulse amplification, a technique which "paved the way towards the shortest and most intense laser pulses ever created by mankind."
Semiconductor saturable-absorber mirror
semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) invented and demonstrated by Ursula Keller in 1992
Conwell–Weisskopf theory
One of the first ionized impurity scattering mobility models proposed by Esther Conwell in 1950