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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Women in physics | 4/6 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_physics | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T04:39:37.430832+00:00 | kb-cron |
==== 1930s ==== 1931: Sylvia Skan and Victor Montague Falkner publish their work on the Falkner–Skan boundary layer. 1931: Toshiko Yuasa becomes the first Japanese female physicist. 1933: Herta Pöschl (abbreviated G. Pöschl) working with Edward Teller, find that the Pöschl–Teller potential is analytically solvable in quantum mechanics. 1934: Olga N. Trapeznikowa and his husband Lev Shubnikov finish an experiment showing one of the first evidences for the existence of antiferromagnetism. 1935: Katharine Burr Blodgett improves Irving Langmuir experimental set up leading to the development of the Langmuir–Blodgett trough and the discovery of the Langmuir–Blodgett films. 1935: Grete Hermann provides the earliest refutation to John von Neumann's attempt to prove that quantum mechanics is incompatible with hidden variables. 1936: Hertha Sponer becomes the first female professor in the physics faculty in Duke University. 1937: Marietta Blau and her student Hertha Wambacher, both Austrian physicists, received the Lieben Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for their work on cosmic ray observations using the technique of nuclear emulsions. 1938: Tatiana Kontorova, in collaboration with Yakov Frenkel, develops the Frenkel-Kontorova model to describe the structure and nonlinear dynamics of a crystal lattice in the vicinity of the dislocation core. 1939 Lise Meitner helped lead a small group of scientists who first discovered the nuclear fission of uranium when it absorbed an extra neutron. Nuclear physicist Marguerite Perey discovers francium. Sameera Moussa became the first woman to earn a doctorate in atomic radiation and the first woman to hold a teaching post in Cairo University. 1939–1942: Bibha Chowdhuri, working with Debendra Mohan Bose, recovers the first evidence of mesons, 200 heavier than the electron.
==== 1940s ====
c. 1940: Elizabeth Alexander and Ruby Payne-Scott become the first women to work in radio astronomy. Making important results on the study of radar signals coming from the sun. 1941: Ruby Payne-Scott joined the Radio Physics Laboratory of the Australia Government's CSIRO; she was the first woman radio astronomer. 1942: Chicago Pile-1 led by Enrico Fermi, the first nuclear reactor reaches criticality. Leona Woods was the only woman in the team and she was instrumental in the construction and then use of geiger counters for analysis during experimentation. 1943: the Manhattan project hires the Calutron Girls, a large group of young girls to monitor dials and watch meters for calutrons, mass spectrometers adapted for separation of uranium isotopes, unaware of the purpose of the project. 1943: Berta Karlik discovers astatine as a product of two naturally occurring decay chains. She was awarded the Haitinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for this discovery. 1944: Curium (atomic number 96, symbol Cm) gets discovered a gets named after Marie and Pierre Curie, the "m" in Cm as a reference to Marie. 1945: American physicists and mathematicians Frances Spence, Ruth Teitelbaum, Marlyn Meltzer, Betty Holberton, Jean Bartik and Kathleen Antonelli programmed the electronic general-purpose computer ENIAC, becoming some of the world's first computer programmers. 1947: Hilda Hänchen, in collaboration with Fritz Goos, demonstrates a new optical phenomena, now known as the Goos–Hänchen effect. 1948: Phyllis S. Freier's PhD thesis along with the work of his colleagues Edward J. Lofgren, Edward P. Ney, and Frank Oppenheimer, demonstrates the presence of heavy nuclei in cosmic radiation. 1949: Rosemary Brown (later Fowler), a student of C.F. Powell at the University of Bristol, discovers the k-meson in what Heisenberg calls "most beautiful" pictures of cosmic ray tracks from the Jungfraujoch (the 'k' track in Brown, R. et al. Nature, 163, 47 (1949). This discovery and the prior finding of a very similar particle in 1947 led to the "τ–θ puzzle", the discovery of parity violation in weak interactions, and hence the Standard Model.
==== 1950s ==== 1951: Cécile DeWitt-Morette founds the École de physique des Houches, one of the most prestigious scientific centers for international physics summer schools in Europe. 1952: Photograph 51, an X-ray diffraction image of crystallized DNA, was taken by Raymond Gosling in May 1952, working as a PhD student under the supervision of British chemist and biophysicist Rosalind Franklin; it was critical evidence in identifying the structure of DNA. 1952: Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat proves that Einstein field equations can be formulated as an initial value problem (local existence of solutions and uniqueness). 1953: Various authors, including Arianna W. Rosenbluth and Augusta H. Teller, led by Nicholas Metropolis, write the paper titled "Equation of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines" that introduced the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm. 1953: Rose Morton and William L. Haberman identify a constant to characterize bubbles. The constant is now called the Morton number. 1954: Janine Connes pioneers the new field of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy for astronomy. 1954: Sulamith Goldhaber, along with her husband Gerson Goldhaber, start a series of important experiments to measure the properties of the K meson. 1955: the results of the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou simulation is published in Los Alamos National Laboratory. It was coded by Mary Tsingou using the MANIAC I computer working with Enrico Fermi, John Pasta, and Stanislaw Ulam in the Manhattan Project. It represents one of the first computational experiments in mathematics and chaos theory. 1956: Chinese-American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu conducted a nuclear physics experiment in collaboration with the Low Temperature Group of the US National Bureau of Standards. The experiment, becoming known as the Wu experiment, showed that parity could be violated in weak interaction. 1957: Margaret Burbidge releases the landmark B2FH paper as first author along with Geoffrey Burbidge, William A. Fowler, and Fred Hoyle. The paper reviewed stellar nucleosynthesis theory and identified nucleosynthesis processes that are responsible for producing the elements heavier than iron and explained their relative abundances. 1958: Olga Ladyzhenskaya provides the first rigorous proofs of the convergence of a finite difference method for the Navier–Stokes equations. 1960: American medical physicist Rosalyn Yalow received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones" along with Roger Guillemin and Andrew V. Schally who received it "for their discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain".