60 Fun Facts About Women in STEM

Marie Curie is the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in which two different sciences?

She won physics in 1903 with Pierre and Becquerel, and chemistry alone in 1911.

Which two elements did Marie Curie discover?

Polonium was named for her native Poland.

What word did Marie Curie coin for the phenomenon she studied?

She and Pierre worked in a converted shed that had been a dissecting room.

Why were Marie and Pierre Curie's remains sealed in lead when moved to the Pantheon in 1995?

Her notebooks are also still radioactive and kept in lead-lined boxes.

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of which famous poet?

He left a month after she was born; her mother pushed her into mathematics to ward off his 'insanity'.

Ada Lovelace's famous notes described a program for which proposed machine?

Note G laid out a method for computing Bernoulli numbers, often called the first computer program.

Which mathematical sequence did Ada Lovelace's Note G show how to compute?

The engine was never built, so the program was never run.

Which astronaut asked Katherine Johnson to recheck the computer's calculations before his 1962 orbital flight?

She had earlier calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American in space.

Which actress played Katherine Johnson in Hidden Figures?

Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2015.

Rosalind Franklin's most famous X-ray image of DNA is known as what?

Her student Raymond Gosling actually took it, and Wilkins showed it to Watson without her permission.

Franklin earned her 1945 PhD for research on which material?

Her wartime work at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association led to the doctorate in 1945.

Grace Hopper was central to creating which English-based programming language in 1959?

She believed programming should read like English, and her compiler translated English terms into machine code.

What did Grace Hopper's team famously find stuck in a relay of the Harvard Mark II in 1947?

It was taped into the log with the note 'first actual case of bug being found'.

What rank did Grace Hopper reach in the US Navy?

She retired as the oldest active-duty commissioned officer in the Navy, at 79.

Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr co-invented a frequency-hopping guidance system with which composer?

Its principles underpin Bluetooth and early Wi-Fi.

Hedy Lamarr's frequency-hopping patent was intended to guide what?

It aimed to defeat radio jamming by the Axis powers.

Mae Jemison became the first African-American woman in space aboard which shuttle in 1992?

A trained physician, she had served with the Peace Corps in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Jennifer Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with whom for CRISPR gene editing?

They first proposed CRISPR-Cas9 as a programmable genome editor in 2012.

Barbara McClintock won the 1983 Nobel Prize for discovering what in maize?

Scepticism about her work led her to stop publishing her data in 1953.

Emmy Noether's famous theorem links symmetry with what?

Einstein and Weyl called her the most important woman in the history of mathematics.

How did Emmy Noether lecture at Gottingen when the faculty refused to appoint a woman?

She had already worked seven years unpaid at Erlangen.

Chien-Shiung Wu's famous experiment proved that what is not conserved?

Her colleagues Lee and Yang won the 1957 Nobel; she got the first Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978.

Chien-Shiung Wu worked on which wartime effort, separating uranium isotopes?

Her nickname was 'the First Lady of Physics'.

In which national park did Jane Goodall study chimpanzees for more than 60 years?

She began in 1960 under palaeontologist Louis Leakey, whom she first reached by phone while working as a secretary.

What was the name of the toy chimpanzee Jane Goodall's father gave her as a child?

Her mother's friends thought it would frighten her.

Vera Rubin's studies of galaxy rotation curves provided key evidence for what?

A major observatory in Chile now bears her name.

Lise Meitner was instrumental in discovering nuclear fission but was left out of which honour?

It went solely to Otto Hahn; she was nominated for a Nobel 48 times in all.

Lise Meitner fled Nazi Germany in July 1938 to which country?

Physicist Dirk Coster helped her escape; she later settled in Sweden.

Who was the first woman to win the Fields Medal, in 2014?

The Iranian Stanford professor died of breast cancer at 40, three years later.

Who was the first woman in space?

She flew solo on Vostok 6 in 1963 and remains the only woman to fly a solo mission.

What was the first woman in space's job before she was selected as a cosmonaut?

Her hobby, amateur skydiving, was what qualified her.

How many times did Tereshkova orbit the Earth on Vostok 6?

She spent almost three days in space, aged 26.

Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in which year?

She was the third woman overall and, at 32, the youngest American astronaut to fly.

Besides physics, in what subject did Sally Ride earn a bachelor's degree at Stanford?

She had also been a nationally ranked junior tennis player.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered what as a PhD student in 1967?

The 1974 Nobel for the discovery went to her supervisor Antony Hewish, not to her.

What did Jocelyn Bell Burnell do with her $3 million Breakthrough Prize in 2018?

She had described her first pulsar signal as 'a bit of scruff' on chart paper.

Dorothy Hodgkin won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping the structure of which molecule?

She had earlier proved penicillin contains a beta-lactam ring, and remains the only British woman to win a science Nobel.

Rachel Carson's 1962 book that launched the modern environmental movement was called what?

It focused on the effects of synthetic pesticides such as DDT.

Tu Youyou won the 2015 Nobel Prize for discovering a drug against which disease?

Artemisinin came from sweet wormwood used in traditional Chinese medicine; she was China's first female Nobel laureate.

Margaret Hamilton led development of the on-board flight software for which program?

She is credited with coining the term 'software engineering'.

Which term is Margaret Hamilton credited with coining?

She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

Katalin Kariko's Nobel-winning work laid the groundwork for which medical technology?

She shared the 2023 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine with Drew Weissman after years of scepticism.

Gertrude Elion's rational drug design led to which first widely used AIDS drug?

She shared the 1988 Nobel with George Hitchings and James Black.

Who was the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, in 1849?

She graduated from Geneva Medical College and later became the first woman on Britain's Medical Register.

Hypatia, the first female mathematician whose life is well recorded, taught in which ancient city?

She was the daughter of the mathematician Theon and was murdered by a mob in 415 AD.

Frances Arnold won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering what technique?

She holds the Linus Pauling professorship at Caltech.

Donna Strickland's 2018 physics Nobel recognised her work on what?

She was only the third woman to win the physics prize, after Curie and Maria Goeppert Mayer.

Andrea Ghez shared the 2020 physics Nobel for discovering what at the centre of the Milky Way?

She shared it with Reinhard Genzel.

Rita Levi-Montalcini won the 1986 Nobel Prize for discovering what?

The Italian neurobiologist lived to 103.

In what year did Marie Curie become the first female professor at the University of Paris?

It was the year her husband Pierre died in a street accident.

Which university gave Jane Goodall a PhD in ethology in 1965 despite her lacking a bachelor's?

Her book In the Shadow of Man was translated into 48 languages.

How many honorary degrees did Grace Hopper receive in her lifetime?

A Navy destroyer, a Cray supercomputer and an Nvidia GPU architecture are all named for her.

Mary Anning found the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton at what age?

She collected fossils from the cliffs at Lyme Regis, Dorset, and as a woman was barred from joining the Geological Society of London.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's 1925 thesis showed stars are made mostly of which two elements?

Her conclusion was initially rejected by Henry Norris Russell, since the science of the day assumed stars resembled Earth in composition.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovered the period-luminosity relation for which kind of star?

'Leavitt's Law' gave astronomers their first standard candle for measuring distances to other galaxies.

Caroline Herschel, the first woman paid a salary as a scientist, was best known for discovering what?

The periodic comet 35P/Herschel-Rigollet bears her name, and she won the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal in 1828.

Which geologist mapped the Atlantic Ocean floor with Bruce Heezen, revealing the Mid-Atlantic Ridge?

Tharp's discovery caused a paradigm shift that led to the acceptance of plate tectonics and continental drift.

Maria Goeppert Mayer shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries concerning what?

She was only the second woman to win the physics Nobel, after Marie Curie in 1903.

Which US president awarded Katherine Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015?

Over a 33-year career she calculated trajectories for Project Mercury and rendezvous paths for Apollo's lunar module.

In 1958, who became NASA's first Black female engineer after taking engineering classes?

Jackson started as a computer in Langley's segregated West Area Computing division in 1951 and later took a demotion to manage NASA's Federal Women's Program.