5.6 KiB
| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Women in physics | 5/6 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_physics | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T04:39:37.430832+00:00 | kb-cron |
==== 1960s ==== 1961: Ellen Fetter and Margaret Hamilton were collaborators with Edward Norton Lorenz in weather forecasting, establishing together modern chaos theory. 1961: Nina Byers, jointly with C.N. Yang, studies the quantum Hall effect. Together they proved the Byers–Yang theorem. 1962: French physicist Marguerite Perey became the first female Fellow elected to the Académie des Sciences. 1963: Maria Goeppert Mayer became the first American woman to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics; she shared the prize with J. Hans D. Jensen "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure" and Eugene Paul Wigner "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles". 1963: Experiments by Myriam Sarachik provided the first data that confirmed the Kondo effect. 1964: Chien-Shiung Wu spoke at MIT about gender discrimination. 1967: Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell co-discovered the first radio pulsars. 1967: Helen Freedhoff becomes the first female professor of York University and it is believed to be one the only female professor of physics in Canada at that time. 1969: Helen Hopfield develops the Hopfield model to study the troposphere and satellite-tracking. 1970: Astronomer Vera Rubin published the first evidence for dark matter. 1970: Madeleine Veyssié, coins the term soft matter.
==== 1970s ====
1971 Mina Rees became the first woman president of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) founded in 1848. 1972: Willie Hobbs Moore became the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in physics. 1972: Sandra Faber became the first woman to join the Lick Observatory staff at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 1973: American physicist Anna Coble became the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in biophysics, completing her dissertation at University of Illinois. 1975: Mary K. Gaillard, working with Benjamin W. Lee and Jonathan L. Rosner, predicts the mass of the charm quark before it was measured. She will later also predict the mass of the bottom quark. 1975: María Teresa Ruiz, becomes the first woman to obtain a PhD in astrophysics at Princeton University. 1976: Sandra Faber publishes her Faber–Jackson relation, providing the first empirical power-law relation between the luminosity and the central stellar velocity dispersion of elliptical galaxy. 1977: Helen Quinn develops the Peccei–Quinn theory as one of the first possible solutions to the strong CP problem, in collaboration with Roberto Peccei. 1978: Chien-Shiung Wu becomes the inaugural laureate of the Wolf Prize in Physics for her help with the development of the Standard Model. 1979: Sau Lan Wu, working alongside Paul Söding, Björn Wiik and Günter Wolf, finds evidence for three-jet events in e+e- collision in the Positron–Electron Tandem Ring Accelerator (PETRA) at DESY, leading to the confirmation of the existence of the gluon. The 4 collaborators received the 1995 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of European Physical Society for this discovery. 1980: Nigerian geophysicist Deborah Ajakaiye became the first woman in any West African country to be appointed a full professor of physics. Over the course of her scientific career, she became the first female Fellow elected to the Nigerian Academy of Science, and the first female dean of science in Nigeria. 1980: Mary K. Gaillard produces a report at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) addressing the fact that just 3% of the staff were women. She called for the elimination of gender discrimination through equality in promotion, maternity leave and full-day child care.
==== 1980s ==== 1981: Mary K. Gaillard becomes the first woman with a tenured position in the physics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. 1985: Mildred Dresselhaus was appointed the first women Institute Professor at MIT 1986: Maria Goeppert Mayer Award was awarded for the first time to honor young female physicists at the beginning of their careers 1986 Jean M. Bennett became the first woman president of The Optical Society founded in 1916.
==== 1990s ==== 1991: Ana María López, graduate student of Eduardo Fradkin, develops the first Chern–Simons theory for composite fermions to explain the fractional quantum Hall effect. 1992: Claudine Hermann first woman to be appointed professor at École Polytechnique. 1995: Reva Williams works out the Penrose process for rotating black holes. 1997: Chemical element with atomic number 278 is officially named meitnerium, after Lise Meitner. 1999: Lisa Randall published the Randall–Sundrum model, with Raman Sundrum. 1999: The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) creates the Working Group on Women in Physics suggest means to improve the situation for women in physics. 2000 Mildred Dresselhaus became the director of the Office of Science at the United States Department of Energy. Helen Quinn becomes the first woman to receive the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) "pioneering contributions to the quest for a unified theory of quarks and leptons and the strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions." Valerie Coffman, working with Joydip Kundu and William Wootters establish the concept of monogamy of entanglement for tripartite systems, using their Coffman–Kundu–Wooters inequality.
=== 21st century ===