Irène Curie - Like Mother Like Daughter

After Marie Curie won Nobel Prizes in 1903 and 1911, no other women won in science until 1935 when her daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, won a Nobel in Chemistry with her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie.

In 1925, Irène Curie walked into an auditorium of 1000 people to defend her dissertation. This was big news because she was the daughter of two time Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie. The pressure could have been enormous, but as usual Irène was calm, confident, and dressed unfashionably! From an early age, Irène had dealt with her parent’s fame both positive, such as when at the age of six she calmly told the reporter who came to the house that her Nobel Prize winning parents were at the laboratory, and negative when a classmate handed her a newspaper article about her mother’s affair with Paul Langevin. She had come to see fame as something external and of no real importance. She didn’t pursue her research for fame, but for the sheer joy of the science itself.

At first glance, Irène was a quiet, shy child, some might even say somber, but as time would show, she just had little energy or attention for things that in her mind didn’t matter or that bored her. Born in September of 1897, her parents Pierre and Marie Curie were in the midst of their most intense period of research. In spite of this, she was a wanted and welcome addition to the family. Limited time and resources, however, did mean that the young parents needed help, and this came in the form of Pierre’s father, Eugene Curie. Pierre’s mother died shortly after Irène was born, so Eugene moved into the house to take care of her.
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Women Role Models in STEM

Only 20% of bachelor degree in STEM are held by women. Why aren't women entering the science fields? Some say it's because there aren't enough role models for girls. The people at OnlineUniversities.com don't believe that. They have posted a list of 25 fabulous women involved in STEM fields.

The list includes astronauts, professors, a fighter pilot, a college president, physicists, electronic game creators, a co-founder of Flickr, a co-founder of iRobot, astronomers, etc. Some of the women were familiar to me, but most were not I'm sad to say. Check out the list and see who you know. But more importantly, pass it on to girls and young women you know who might be interested in the sciences. You never know who you might inspire.

25 Female STEM Superheroes of Today

Lise Meitner - Denied the Nobel Prize

In December of 1938, Lise Meitner received a letter from colleagues in Germany explaining their latest experimental results and questioning what these results could mean. For almost 30 years Lise had worked with Otto Hahn, and later Fritz Strassman, performing experiments related to radioactivity. Although she had begun as Hahn’s assistant without pay, their relationship had evolved to the point where she was the recognized expert in matters related to physics; Hahn was a chemist.

Lise’s nephew Otto Frisch was visiting for the holidays and together they discussed the letter she received. Researchers working on radioactivity had known for some time that one element could change into another, such as radium to polonium in Marie Curie’s experiments. But recently several researchers, when bombarding uranium with neutrons, had been finding elements with smaller atomic weights, almost half the atomic weight of uranium. At the time no one believed that the nucleus of an atom could be split. Hahn and Strassman’s research repeated this result. Meitner realized that this was exactly what was happening and that the power that would result from a chain reaction would be immense. Together she and Frisch worked out the mathematics and she conveyed the information to Neils Bohr who was on his way to the United States for a conference. And the rest as they say is history.

I knew this basic scenario when I began to read about Lise Meitner, but as usual there is more to the story. Continue reading

Americans and Evolution

Rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. 

This is the subtitle of an article I read on Alternet, although it was first published on The Nation. The article,  What Is Wrong With Our Education System? Almost Half the Population Doesn't Accept Evolution by Katha Pollitt, has some disturbing statistics.

• 46 percent of Americans with sixteen long years of education under their belt believe the story of Adam and Eve is literally true. 
• 25 percent of Americans with graduate degrees believe dinosaurs and humans romped together before Noah’s flood. (emphasis mine)

I once had a Facebook friend tell me that climate change was just a political conspiracy to bring down American business. I responded that if it was just something being discussed or promoted by Americans, I might consider the possibility, but it was REALLY hard to buy a worldwide conspiracy. The same thing applies to evolution.
  

"Almost every scientist on earth would have to be engaged in a fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics. And yet this massive concatenation of lies and delusion is so full of obvious holes that a pastor with a Bible-college degree or a homeschooling parent with no degree at all can see right through it."

Even though we may win battles in court, that doesn't necessarily change what happens on a local level. As she points out in the article, some teachers still skirt the issue of evolution (60 percent) at best while others may teach Creationism out right (13 percent.) Parents who are aware of this and complain face a hard fight often being vilified in the process. What happened in the Dover, PA community in 2004 is good evidence of this.


It's nice to think that as a country we will consistently make progress over time, but the last 30 years or so since I left school sure seem to be taking us backward. The old aphorism "two steps forward, one step back" sure seems to be turning into one step forward, followed by many steps back.


Check out the article, it's worth the read although disturbing.

Emmy Noether - Original in More Ways Than One

“Fraulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.”  ~ Albert Einstein

If you ask anyone to name a famous woman mathematician, the names that come to mind will usually be Hypatia, Ada Lovelace, Emilie du Chatelet, or Maria Agnesi, if they can name any at all. I must admit that these women were the ones who attracted my attention as well when I started reading the history of mathematics. Each of these has something that attracts us apart from mathematics: Hypatia’s brutal death, Ada’s famous father, Emilie’s famous lover, or Maria’s piety. Yet with each of these women there are debates about how much original work they actually did and how much was primarily building on the work of others. There is no doubt that they were all brilliant and deserve to be remembered, but there is one who undoubtedly did work that was so original that it changed the way we do mathematics and is virtually unknown outside of specialist circles: Emmy Noether.

Emmy Noether made groundbreaking contributions to theoretical physics and abstract algebra. She developed several formulations to support Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, in fact he wrote to David Hilbert, “You know that Frl. Noether is continually advising me in my projects and that it is really through her that I have become competent in the subject.” The principle behind Noether’s Theorem is foundational to quantum physics proving that the laws of physics are independent of time and space. And yes you can even blame her for “New Math,” her approach, just very, very, watered down. In spite of all of this, she worked almost her entire life without pay because she was a woman.
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The Shallows by Nicholas G. Carr - A Book Review

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas G. Carr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book. It includes a little for everyone who enjoys non-fiction. Carr goes into the history of different media and how they changed society, such as the written word, printing press, TV, etc. This sets the stage for how the internet is affecting us.

There is good news and not so good news. It seems that use of the internet is very distracting (as if we needed to be told that.) But it's not just distracting us from the rest of our lives, but distracting us while we are surfing. There are so many links, ads, banners, etc. that we are getting better at multitasking and filtering out what is important. But imagine this - You're sitting in a comfortable chair with a good cup of coffee or tea. It's raining softly, maybe a little chilly, and you're sitting there with a soft afghan and one of your favorite books. You quickly get absorbed into the book. Well apparently frequent surfing on the web can decrease our ability to think deeply about what we are reading.

Carr goes into the science of how our brains work, how memory works, and what it takes to hold knowledge in our working memory. He cites many different studies that show our ability to comprehend information that we read decreases in proportion to the number of links and distractions in our material. But this inability to concentrate carries over to reading off of the internet.

The internet is here to stay and we have to make adjustments. When reading material became easily accessible to the general public, the need to memorize knowledge was lessened. Eventually, educators began requiring less memorization which actually decreased our ability to memorize. Now with information at the touch of our fingertips, we are keeping even less information in our working memories. This is no problem for things that are not required for critical thinking, such as logarithms or functions that a calculator could perform for you. But for example, when evaluating current political events in light of historical events, you need to remember the things you've learned.

It's obviously more complicated that this, so I would recommend reading the book for yourself. It's readable and full of interesting information both historical and scientific, which of course made it perfect for me.

View all my reviews

Women in Science and Mathematics

I have an unfortunate habit of becoming distracted by the latest thing that catches my interest. Unfortunately, I began this blog during one of those times and I have failed to keep up with it. One reason, is that the arguments around evolution, climate change, and religion become very tiring. This is a reason for another post, another time, but suffice it to say that as a person who believes in God I have no problem reconciling that belief with science. In fact, the arguments against science seem irrational enough for me to have trouble taking them seriously. So, from time to time it gets my ire up, but lately it's just tiring.

The second reason that this blog has languished is that around the same time I began a blog about women in history - Saints, Sisters, and Sluts. This combined several of my interests - math, science, and history. I have written about women mathematicians and scientists, but also about religious figures in history. Lately, a friend who has spent years researching the history of Great Britain has begun writing about queens of England. This has attracted more attention than I would ever have gotten writing about women in mathematics and science - go figure! But needless to say my attention has been devoted to that blog lately.

However, for the few who may stumble upon this blog and are also interested in women's history in math and science, I invite you to join us on the other blog. Here is a list of the women I've written about so far with links to those posts. You might also find other interesting things on the blog.

Maria Gaetana Agnesi - 18th Century Mathematician

Sonya Kovalevsky - A Marriage of Convenience

 Madame Curie (This is the link to the first of two posts about Maria Curie.)

 Emilie du Chatelet - "femme savant" and paramour

Laura Bassi - Italian Physicist (1711 - 1778)

Mary Fairfax Somerville - Mathematics by Candlelight

Check it out, especially if you also like Queens of England!