Florence Nightingale (May 12, 1820 – August 13, 1910) was a celebrated English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing. She came to prominence while serving as a manager of nurses trained by her during the Crimean War, where she organized the tending to wounded soldiers. She gave nursing a highly favorable reputation and became an icon of Victorian culture, especially in the persona of “The Lady with the Lamp” making rounds of wounded soldiers at night. In 1860, Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment of her nursing school at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. It was the first secular nursing school in the world. In recognition of her pioneering work in nursing, the Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses, and the Florence Nightingale Medal, the highest international distinction a nurse can achieve, were named in her honor, and the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on her birthday.
Rosalind Franklin (July 25, 1920 – April 16, 1958) was an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer who made contributions to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal and graphite. Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, her contributions to the discovery of DNA were largely recognized posthumously. Franklin’s work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA led to the discovery of the DNA double helix for which James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. Watson suggested that Franklin would have ideally been awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but the Nobel Committee does not make posthumous nominations. Franklin died in 1958 at the age of 37 of ovarian cancer.
Katherine Johnson (born August 26, 1918) is an American physicist, space scientist and mathematician who contributed to the United States’ aeronautics and space programs with the early application of digital electronic computers at NASA. Known for accuracy in computerized celestial navigation, she calculated the trajectory for Project Mercury and the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon. In November 2015, President Barack Obama included Johnson on a list of 17 Americans to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for her pioneering example of African-American women in STEM. Obama also highlighted Johnson in his final State of the Union address on January 12, 2016.
Sally Ride (May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012) was an American physicist and astronaut. Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978 and became the first American woman in space in 1983. She remains the youngest American astronaut to have traveled to space, having done so at the age of 32. After flying twice on the orbiter Challenger, she left NASA in 1987. She worked at Stanford University, then at the University of California, San Diego as a professor of physics. She served on the committees that investigated the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, the only person to participate on both. Ride died of pancreatic cancer in 2012.
Ada, Countess of Lovelace was a British mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on the Analytical Engine, an early mechanical general-purpose computer invented by Charles Babbage. The engine was to be programmed using punched cards. Lovelace’s notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. Specifically, she developed an algorithm to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer. Lovelace was born on December 10, 1815 and died on November 27, 1852 at the age of 36.
Hypatia, often called Hypatia of Alexandria, was a Greek mathematician, astronomer and philosopher in Egypt, then a part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was the head of the Neoplatonic school at Alexandria, where she taught philosophy and astronomy. According to contemporary sources, Hypatia was murdered by a Christian mob after being accused of exacerbating a conflict between two prominent figures in Alexandria: the governor Orestes and the Bishop of Alexandria. For some historians, Hypatia’s death symbolized the end of Classical antiquity. She was born born c. AD 350-370 and died in 415.
Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy Rear Admiral. She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer in 1944. In the 1950s, Hopper invented the first compiler for a computer programming language and helped popularize the idea of machine-independent programming languages—which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages. She is credited with popularizing the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches (in one instance, removing a moth from a computer). Owing to her accomplishments and her naval rank, Hopper is sometimes referred to as “Amazing Grace.” She was born on December 9, 1906 and died on January 1, 1992.
Margaret Hamilton is a computer scientist, systems engineer and business owner. She was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program. In 1969, in a critical moment of the Apollo 11 mission, Hamilton’s team’s work prevented an abort of landing on the moon. She was 32 years old when the Apollo Lunar Module landed on the moon while running her code. She designed software robust enough to handle buffer overflows and cycle-stealing, which was instrumental in the success of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Hamilton is also credited with coining the term “software engineering.” In 1986, she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around the Universal Systems Language, based on her paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBTF) for systems and software design. Hamilton was born on August 17, 1936.
Jane Goodall is an English primatologist, ethologist, anthropologist and UN Messenger of Peace. Considered to be the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her 55-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots program, and she has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues. She has served on the board of the Nonhuman Rights Project since its founding in 1996. Goodall was born on April 3, 1934.
Marie Curie was a French-Polish physicist and chemist, famous for her pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person to win in multiple sciences (1903 in Physics and 1911 in Chemistry). She studied at Warsaw’s clandestine Flying University before moving to Paris. Her achievements include a theory of radioactivity, techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes and the discovery of polonium and radium. Curie was born on this day in 1867 and died in 1934 of aplastic anemia from years of exposure to radiation.
Note: After more than 100 years, all of Curie’s papers are still incredibly radioactive. Opening the lead-lined boxes that contain her manuscripts requires radiation gear.
Rachel Carson was an American marine biologist whose writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement. Her book Silent Spring (1962) documented detrimental effects of pesticides on the environment, particularly on birds. This led to a nationwide ban on DDT, and inspired a grassroots environmental movement that resulted in the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She was born on May 27, 1907.
