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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Women in physics | 3/6 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_physics | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T04:39:37.430832+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== 19th century === 1806: Carl Friedrich Gauss recognizes Marie-Jeanne de Lalande as the only woman he knows working in science. Unaware that his correspondent Sophie Germain was a woman. 1816: French mathematician and physicist Sophie Germain became the first women to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her work on elasticity theory. 1828: Caroline Herschel, sister of William Herschel, becomes the first woman to publish in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and is awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. 1835: Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville became the first female Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society. 1856: Amateur scientist Eunice Newton Foote provides the first demonstration of the warming effect of the sun is greater for air with water vapour than for dry air, and the effect is even greater with carbon dioxide (greenhouse effect). 1890: Alice Everett becomes the first woman to be employed and paid at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. 1891: Agnes Pockels, is helped by Rayleigh to publish her first paper on nature of surface tension. There she first introduces the concept of the Pockels point and pioneers the field of surface science. 1893: Astronomer Dorothea Klumpke becomes the first woman to earn a Doctor of Science degree at the Sorbonne University. 1893: Alice Everett becomes the first woman to have a paper published by the Physical Society of London. 1895: Margaret Eliza Maltby becomes the first woman to earn a doctorate in the University of Göttingen. 1896: Elizabeth Stephansen becomes the first woman to complete the physics program of Zurich Polytechnic. 1897: American physicist Isabelle Stone became the first woman to receive a PhD in physics in the United States. She wrote her dissertation "On the Electrical Resistance of Thin Films" at the University of Chicago. 1898: Danish physicist Kirstine Meyer was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. 1888: The Kovalevskaya top, one of a brief list of known examples of integrable rigid body motion, was discovered by Sofia Kovalevskaya. 1899: Irish physicist Edith Anne Stoney was appointed a physics lecturer at the London School of Medicine for Women, becoming the first woman medical physicist. She later became a pioneering figure in the use of x-ray machines on the front lines of World War I. 1899: American physicists Marcia Keith and Isabelle Stone became charter members of the American Physical Society.
=== 20th century ===
==== 1900s ====
1903: Marie Curie was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize; she received the Nobel Prize in Physics along with her husband, Pierre Curie "for their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel", and Henri Becquerel, "for his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity". 1900: Physicists Marie Curie and Isabelle Stone attended the first International Congress of Physics in Paris, France. They were the only two women out of 836 participants. 1904: Annie S. D. Maunder and her husband Edward Walter Maunder publish the butterfly diagram to study sunspots. They also identify the Maunder Minimum. 1906: English physicist, mathematician and engineer Hertha Ayrton became the first female recipient of the Hughes Medal from the Royal Society of London. She received the award for her experimental research on electric arcs and sand ripples. The first woman to be nominated for the Royal Society and to give a lecture to the Society. 1907: Ayrton joins the Suffragettes and the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). 1909: Danish physicist Kristine Meyer became the first Danish woman to receive a doctorate degree in natural sciences. She wrote her dissertation on the topic of "the development of the temperature concept" within the history of physics.
==== 1910s ==== 1911: Marie Curie became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which she received "[for] the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element". This made her the only woman to win two Nobel Prizes. 1912: Astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt studied the bright-dim cycle periods of Cepheid stars, then found a way to calculate the distance from such stars to Earth. 1921: Édmée Chandon is admitted at the Paris Observatory, becoming the first female professional astronomer in France. 1913: Geertruida de Haas-Lorentz is the first to study of thermal noise in electric circuits, predating the discovery of the Johnson–Nyquist noise. 1918: Emmy Noether created Noether's theorem explaining the connection between symmetry and conservation laws. 1918: Luise Lange measures for the first time the electric dipole moment of a molecular solution. 1919: Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen proves the Bohr–Van Leeuwen theorem in her thesis explaining why magnetism is an essentially quantum mechanical effect.
==== 1920s ====
1922: the International Astronomical Union adopts the stellar classification used by Annie Jump Cannon. She came up with the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures and spectral types. 1925: Annie Jump Cannon became the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate of science from Oxford University. 1925: Astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin established that hydrogen is the most common element in stars, and thus the most abundant element in the universe. 1926: Katharine Burr Blodgett was the first women to earn a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge. 1926: The first application of quantum mechanics to molecular systems was done by Lucy Mensing. She studied the rotational spectrum of diatomic molecules using the methods of matrix mechanics. 1927: Luise Lange provides an explanation for the twin paradox and defends special relativity against critics of Albert Einstein.