Women in STEM History - Judith Love Cohen

Sometimes you read about a person and then immediately have make a post about it. This is one of those times.

Judith Love Cohen (August 16, 1933 – July 25, 2016) was an American aerospace engineer and author who worked on the Apollo Space Program at the height of her engineering career. In particular she worked on the Abort-Guidance System that saved the lives of the astronauts on the Apollo 13 mission. After retiring as an engineer, she started a publishing company called Cascade Pass in order to publish educational books encouraging children and girls specifically into STEM fields of work. Many of these books she authored herself.

Now I would not normally mention my subject’s personal life at all, because that’s not what this series is about. In this case I will make an exception because there’s a particularly good anecdote as follows.

On the day of the birth of her fourth child, she went to the office in the morning (for the Apollo Space Program) to do a little more work. When it was time to go to the hospital, she took with her a computer printout of the problem she was working on. Later that day, she called her boss and told him that she had solved the problem. And . . . oh, yes, the baby was born, too.

The baby that was born that day? Jack Black… yes that Jack Black. One can only assume much of his excellence comes from his brilliant mother.

You can read more about Judith Love Cohen in an obituary written by her son Neil Siegal here

Women in STEM History - Mary Somerville

Today’s Woman in STEM is Mary Somerville. Born in Scotland in 1780, she wrote 7 influential science books in her lifetime, earning the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for "Physical Geography" in 1869. She and Caroline Herschel were also the first women honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society. She is currently featured on the back of the Royal Bank of Scotlands ten pound note with a quote from her fourth book "The Connection of the Physical Sciences". As this book is well out of copyright, the ebook can be found for free, digitised by the Gutenberg Project, here.

Women in STEM History - Virginia (Ginny) Strazisar Travers

Today's Woman in STEM is Virginia (Ginny) Strazisar Travers. She was working for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) during the "bread truck" packet swtiching wireless San Francisco experiment and is credited with developing the first true TCP/IP router in 1979. The Computer History Museum wrote an excellent article on these events on the 40th anniversary in 2017, found here, and also created an excellent panel interview with Virgina Strazisar Travers and others on the 30th anniversary in 2007 available on Youtube (and embedded below.)

Women in STEM History - Beulah Louise Henry

Todays Woman in STEM history is Beulah Louise Henry. She was a prolific inventor through the early 20th century. She held 49 patents in her lifetime and has around 110 inventions attributed to her. You can read more about her here.

Women in STEM History - Mary Jackson

Todays Woman in STEM history is Mary Jackson. Hopefully you’ve heard of her before, because she’s been portrayed by Janelle Monáe in the film Hidden Figures. Mary Jackson was first hired in 1951 at Langley Research Centre as a “computer”or what we would now call a research mathematician. In 1953, she moved within Langley to work with Kazimierz Czarnecki in the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel. It took her sometime to become qualified as an engineer but from 1958 to 1979 she worked as an Aeronautical Engineer for NASA, the first black woman to do so. From 1979 she continued to work for NASA as the Federal Women’s Program Manager in the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs until her retirement in 1985 . She authored or co-authored 12 technical papers over her time at NASA and helped many women and other minorities advance their careers within NASA. You can read more in the book “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race” by Margot Lee Shetterly or on NASA’s own website.

Women in STEM History – Susan Kare

Todays Woman in STEM history is Susan Kare. She is a graphic designer who has been instrumental in building the online world we live in today, though I never knew about her until today. She designed the original Macintosh Icons in 1983 including the save icon, the watch, the trash bin and many more. She went on to design for Microsoft, Facebook and now Pinterest.  There’s a New Yorker article here that’s very good if you want to know more or you can simply go to her own website to see which pieces of her work you’ve known about, but not known about, for years. 

Women in STEM History - Ada Lovelace

Today’s Woman in STEM History is Ada Lovelace. She is generally considered to be the first ever computer programmer for her work translating and augmenting a french transcription of Charles Babbage’s seminar on his Analytical Engine. In her extra notes, she wrote an algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers. Unfortunately the machine was never completed so her program was never tested. More information on this fascinating woman can be found here.

Women in STEM History – Hedy Lamarr

Today, I’m starting a new series highlighting Women in STEM History. I’m beginning with Hedy Lamarr, because it’s one of my favourite pieces of historical trivia, that one of most famous and glamourous film stars of the 30’s and 40’s was also the inventor whose frequency-hopping signal technology paved the way for our current Wifi systems. You can find out more about her here