She wrote the world's first computer program.

There were sea monsters buried in her backyard.

The ozone layer was torn apart by the chemical.

These women changed the way we think about the world, even if you don't know their names or faces. They advanced their fields despite facing tremendous odds. As we celebrate their stories, join us now. There are 20 amazing women who changed math and science.

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Mary Anning (1799-1847)

Mary Anning illustration

(Image credit: Getty)

Mary Anning was a fossil hunter. She was born and raised near the cliffs of Lyme Regis in southwestern England, and the rocky outcrops near her home were teeming with fossils.

When the field of paleontology was only open to women, she taught herself how to prepare the relics. The University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley, California, reported that Anning provided London paleontologists with their first glimpse of a large marine reptile that lived alongside dinosaurs. The first fossil of a marine reptile was found by her. Scientists named a new species after Anning in 2015.

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717)

naturalist Maria Sybilla Merian in an engraving

(Image credit: Photo 12/Universal Images Group/Getty)

Maria Sibylla Merian created drawings of insects and plants. Merian noted and revealed aspects of biology that were previously unknown.

Prior to Merian discovering that insects hatched from eggs, it was thought that the creatures were created from mud. She was the first scientist to document and observe insect life cycles and how they interacted with their habitats, according to The New York Times.

The Royal Collection Trust in the U.K. says that Merian's best-known work is the 1705 book "Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium."

Sylvia Earle (born 1935)

Sylvia Earle underwater in scuba gear

(Image credit: Fairfax Media/Getty)

From the title of a 1989 profile in The New Yorker, Sylvia Earle is affectionately known as Her Deepness. In her 70 years of diving, she has spent about a year underwater, she told The Telegraph.

Few women worked in the field of ocean research in the late 1960s. She was the first woman scientist to descend in a submarine to a depth of 100 feet in the Bahamas, and she was pregnant at the time.

Sylvia Earle'sSearching for Wisdom is related in images.

Two years later, Earle led a team of five women on a two-week mission to explore the seafloor. Since then, she has led more than 100 expeditions in oceans around the world, and in 1990 she became the first woman to serve as chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Mae Jemison (born 1956)

Space Shuttle Endeavour (STS-47) onboard photo of Astronaut Mae Jemison working in Spacelab-J module.

(Image credit: NASA)

In 1992, Mae Jemison became the first African American woman to reach space when the space shuttle Endeavour blasted off. She has many titles, one of which is anastrologer. According to Space.com, a Live Science sister site, Jemison is a physician, a Peace Corps volunteer, a teacher, and a founder and president of two technology companies.

On October 17, 1956, Jemison was born in Decatur, Alabama. She moved to Chicago with her family when she was 3 years old and fell in love with science. She earned degrees in chemical engineering and African and African American studies at the university when she was 16. She obtained her doctorate in medicine from Cornell University. During her time as a Peace Corps volunteer, she spent time in Sierra Leone.

After training with NASA, the six other astronauts were able to circle Earth 126 times. During her time in space, she carried out two experiments on bone cells.

A Lego minifigure made in her honor is one of the things that Jemison has.

Maria Goeppert Mayer (1906-1972)

Dr. Maria Goeppert Mayer (shown in file photo) of the University of California was named a co-winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physics. She and Prof. Hans D. Jenson of the University of Heidelberg in Germany were awarded for their joint discoveries on nuclear shell structure. Prof. Eugene Wigner of Princeton University shared the award with the two.

(Image credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty)

Maria Goeppert Mayer was the second woman to win a prize in physics after Marie Curie.

Goeppert was born in Germany on June 28, 1906. Although women from her generation rarely attended university, Goeppert Mayer went to the University at Gttingen in Germany to study quantum mechanics.

She earned her doctorate at the age of 24. She married an American named Joseph Edward Mayer and moved with him to Baltimore. She continued to work on physics despite the university not hiring her during the Depression.

The couple moved to New York where she worked on the atomic bomb project. She shared the prize with two other scientists for her work on the architecture of the nucleus.

Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909-2012)

Italian scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini wearing a white gown sitting at a desk and holding a guinea pig's tail. Italy, 1950s

(Image credit: Mondadori/Getty)

Rita Levi-Montalcini's father discouraged her from pursuing a higher education because he held Victorian notions that women should embrace the full-time job of being a wife and mother. Levi-Montalcini's work on nerve growth factor earned her a prize.

It was not easy to get to success. Levi-Montalcini graduated summa cum laude in medicine and surgery in 1936 after attending medical school. World War II interrupted her research as she began to study neurology and psychiatry. She set up a research lab in her home, where she studied development in chick embryos, until she had to leave her job and go into hiding.

After the war, she accepted a position at Washington University in St. Louis, where she and her colleagues found that a substance from a mouse tumor spurred nerve growth when it was put into chick embryos. Stanley Cohen was able to identify the substance as nerve growth factor. He and Levi-Montalcini shared the prize in 1986.

Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017)

Maryam Mirzhakhani, the only woman to win the prestigious Fields Medal

(Image credit: Newscom)

The mathematician was known for her work in the geometry of curved spaces. She was born in Tehran, Iran, and did her most important work as a professor at Stanford University.

She helped explain the nature of geodesics. It turned up answers to long-standing mysteries in the field and had practical applications for understanding the behavior of earthquakes.

She was the first woman to win the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics. The International Mathematical Union awards the Fields Medal to mathematicians under the age of 40 each year.

One year after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, Mirzakhani received her medal. She died of cancer at the age of 40. Alex Eskin won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in mathematics for his work with Mirzakhani on the magic wand theorem.

Emmy Noether (1882-1935)

EMMY NOETHER (1882-1935) German mathematician, about 1905

(Image credit: Alamy)

The groundwork for modern physics and two key fields of mathematics was laid by the research of one of the great mathematicians of the early 20th century.

The most important work of Noether was done at the University of Gttingen in Germany.

Her most famous work is called Noether's theorem, which has to do with symmetry, and it laid the groundwork for further work that became necessary for modern physics and quantum mechanics.

She made contributions to a number of other fields after she helped build the foundations of abstract algebra.

Hitler expelled Jews from the universities. After seeing students in her home, Noether followed other Jewish German scientists, like Albert Einstein, to the United States. She worked at two universities before she died.

Susan Solomon (born 1956) 

Susan Solomon is the author of 'The Coldest March' about the illfated expedition of Robert Scott to Antarctic in 1912. She is in her Boulder home.

(Image credit: Denver Post/Getty)

Susan Solomon is an atmospheric chemist, author and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was the first to propose that chlorofluorocarbons were responsible for the hole in the ozone layer.

She led a team in 1986 and 1987 to McMurdo Sound, where they gathered evidence that the chemicals released by aerosols and other consumer products interacted with ultraviolet light to remove ozone from the atmosphere.

The U.N. Montreal Protocol banned chlorofluorocarbons worldwide in 1989. It is considered one of the most successful environmental projects in history, and the hole in the ozone layer has shrunk considerably since the protocol was adopted.

Virginia Apgar (1909-1974)

Virginia Apgar, who created the Apgar test for babies

(Image credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty)

The Apgar score, a simple and quick method to assess the health of newborns, was invented by Dr. Virginia Apgar, a pioneer in the medical fields of anesthesiology and obstetrics.

Apgar was going to become a surgeon after receiving her medical degree. She switched to anesthesiology because there were limited career opportunities for women in surgery. She would go on to become a leader in the field and the first woman to be named a full professor at Columbia University.

Apgar investigated the effects of anesthesia used during childbirth. The Apgar scoring system was developed in 1952 to assess the vital signs of newborn babies. The score is based on measures of the newborn's heart rate, breathing effort, muscle tone, reflexes and color, with lower scores indicating that the baby needs immediate medical attention. The system helped give rise to the field of neonatology and is still used today.

Brenda Milner (born 1918)

Brenda Milner

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Sometimes called the " founder of neuropsychology", Brenda Milner has made a lot of discoveries about the human brain.

Patient H.M. is a man who lost the ability to form new memories after undergoing brain surgery. Patient H.M. was able to learn new tasks even if he had no recollection of doing them. According to the Canadian Association for Neuroscience, there are multiple types of memory systems in the brain. The scientific understanding of the functions of different areas of the brain was helped by the work of Milner.

Her work continues. At the age of 103, Milner is still a professor at the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at the University of Montreal.

Karen Uhlenbeck (born 1942)

Karen Uhlenbeck, winner of the Abel Prize

(Image credit: Terje Bendiksby/NTB scanpi/Newscom)

Karen Uhlenbeck was the first woman to ever receive the award. Her contributions to mathematical physics, analysis and geometry won her the award.

She is considered to be one of the pioneers in the field of geometric analysis, which is the study of shapes using partial differential equations. The methods and tools that she developed are being used all over the field.

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Uhlenbeck made major contributions to gauge theories, a set of quantum physics equations. She discovered the shapes soap films can take in higher-dimensional curved spaces.

Her friend, a mathematician at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, said that she couldn't think of anyone who deserved the prize more. She is not just brilliant, she is amazingly brilliant.

Jane Goodall (born 1934)

Jane Goodall with a chimpanzee

(Image credit: Getty)

The way we see wild Chimpanzees has changed thanks to Jane Goodall's work.

In 1960, she began her study of Chimpanzees in the Gombe forest. Chimpanzees make and use tools that were thought to be unique to humans, according to National Geographic. She found that the animals had complex social behaviors, such as altruism and ritualized behaviors.

Only a few people have ever been allowed to study at the graduate level without first receiving an undergraduate degree, and that's what Goodall did in 1965, when he earned a doctorate in ethology from the University of Cambridge. The Jane Goodall Institute was founded in 1977.

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)

An illustration of Ada Lovelace, who is considered the world's first computer programmer

(Image credit: API/Gamma-Rapho/Getty)

It is thought that the world's first computer programmer was the self-taught mathematician, Ada Lovelace.

He was fascinated by math and machinery. At the age of 17, she met English mathematician Charles Babbage, who was demonstrating a prototype for hisanalytical engine, the world's first computer. She decided to learn everything she could about the machine.

A paper about the analytical engine was translated by Lovelace. She published her own notes about the machine. She created a formula for calculating Bernoulli numbers in the notes. According to a previous Live Science report, this formula can be thought of as the first computer program ever written.

The symbol for women in science and engineering is Lovelace. On the second Tuesday of October, her day is celebrated.

Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994)

Dorothy Hodgkin, reknowned X-ray crystallographer and chemist

(Image credit: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis/Getty)

The 1964 chemistry prize was won by an English chemist, who discovered the structure of peni c illin.

At age 10, she became very interested in crystals and chemistry, and as an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, she became one of the first to study the structure of organic compounds using a method called X-ray crystallography. She helped to make the first X-ray diffraction study of the stomach enzyme pepsin in her graduate studies at the University of Cambridge.

She stayed in Oxford until she retired after being offered a temporary research fellowship in 1934. She began her research at the Museum of Natural History after establishing an X-ray lab.

In 1945, Hodgkin described the arrangement of the atoms in penicillin, and in the mid-1950s, she discovered the structure of vitamins B12 and C. In 1969 she determined the chemical structure of the drug.

Caroline Herschel (1750-1848)

Astronomer Caroline Herschel

(Image credit: Getty)

A bad case of typhus may have caused the reputation of the world's first professional female astronomer to be ruined. At 10 years old, her height peaked at 4 feet, 3 inches (130 centimeters), as were her marriage prospects, as reported by the Britannica. Herschel's education was abandoned for housework until her brother, William Herschel, spirited her away to Bath, England, in 1772.

William Herschel was a musician and astronomer. After graduating from grinding and polishing her brother's telescope mirrors, she made her own discoveries. While assisting her brother in his role as court astronomer to King George III in 1783, she detected three previously undiscovered nebulas and became the first woman to discover a comet.

The first professional female astronomer in history was given an annual pension of 50 pounds by the king in 1787. She was awarded gold medals for her research from the Royal Astronomical Society and the King of Prussia.

Sophie Germain (1776-1831)

French mathematician Sophie Germain

(Image credit: Roger Viollet/Getty)

The French mathematician was best known for her discovery of a special case in Fermat's last theorem and for her work in the theory of elasticity.

When she was 13 years old, Germain began to like math. Germain was not allowed to receive a formal education in science and mathematics because of her interest in the subject as a young woman.

Germain used a male student's name to submit her work to the math instructors she admired. The instructors were impressed even when they found out that Germain was a woman, and they took her under their wing as much as they could.

Germain won a contest in 1816 to come up with a mathematical explanation for a set of unusual images. Germain corrected her previous errors to solve the puzzle. The judges were impressed with her third solution and deemed it worthy of a prize.

Germain wrote to her mentors about how she was working to prove Fernat's last theorem. The result of Germain's efforts is now known as "Sophie Germain's theorem".

Patricia Bath (1942-2019)

Patricia Bath, ophthalmologist and inventor of the laserphaco system

(Image credit: Jemal Countess/Getty)

Dr. Bath was a laser scientist. In 1974 Bath became the first female ophthalmologist to be appointed to the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Medicine Jules Stein Eye Institute.

Bath was inspired at a young age to pursue a career in medicine after learning of Dr. Albert Schweitzer's service to the people of what is now Gabon, in Africa, in the early 1900s.

Bath noticed that there were more blind or visually impaired patients at the eye clinic in Harlem than at the eye clinic at Columbia University. She found that there was a lack of access to eye care that led to the prevalence of blind people in Harlem. Bath proposed a new discipline, community ophthalmology, which trains volunteers to offer primary eye care to underserved populations. The concept has saved the sight of thousands who would have gone undetected and treated.

Bath was 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 The American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness was founded in 1977.

The laserphaco probe is a new method and device to remove cataracts that was invented by Bath. She received a patent for the technology in 1986. The device is used all over the world.

Rachel Carson (1907-1964) 

Rachel Carson, author of "Silent Spring"

(Image credit: Hank Walker/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty )

Rachel Carson was a science writer. She is best known for her book "Silent Spring", which describes the harmful effects of pesticides on the environment. According to the National Women's History Museum, the book led to the nationwide ban of harmful pesticides.

She received her masters degree in zoology from the University of Baltimore in 1932. In 1936, she became the second woman hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and later the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She began to document the effects of pesticides on fish and wildlife after visiting many waterways around the bay region.

The Fish and Wildlife Service made her the editor in chief of all of its publications because of her talent as a science writer. After the success of her first two books on marine life, she resigned from the Fish and Wildlife Service to focus more on writing.

With the help of two other former employees from the Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson spent years studying the effects of pesticides on the environment. She summarized her findings in her fourth book. The pesticide industry tried to get rid of Carson, but the U.S. government ordered a complete review of its pesticide policy. Americans have been credited with being inspired to consider the environment.

Ingrid Daubechies (born 1954)

Noted mathematician Ingrid Daubechies

(Image credit: Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty)

The honors and scientific citations of Ingrid Daubechies would make a drugstore receipt look small, as she was drawn to math from an early age. She loved figuring out why certain mathematical things were true and had an interest in how things worked. She loved sewing doll clothes because of the math, and she remembers falling asleep.

1987 would be the most important number to her. She made a major mathematical breakthrough in the field of wavelets, which are similar to mini waves, because they fade with the wave.

She discovered wavelets that are used in image compression and even in some models used for search engines.

She is a professor of mathematics and electrical and computer engineering at Duke University, where she studies wavelet theory, machine learning and other fields at the intersection of physics, math and engineering.

Marie Curie (1867-1934)

Marie Curie lecturing at the Sorbonne

(Image credit: Photo by: Christophel Fine Art/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, but she was also a remarkable scientist who had an impact on the world for a long time. She is remembered for her discoveries of radium and polonium.

According to the website of the Nobel Prize, Curie is known for a number of other achievements. In 1903, Curie was the first woman in France to earn a doctorate in physics. She was the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris. radium was used to treat cancer tumors. She received a second Nobel Prize in chemistry for her work in radioactivity. She was responsible for establishing the use of X-ray machines in World War I, as well as creating two important medical institutions in Poland and France.

Marie Sklodowska was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1867, but she moved to Paris in 1891, where she met and married Pierre Curie, a French physicist, and they had a child. She earned her doctorate from the University of Paris in 1903. Despite working in relative obscurity during her early years, her work on radioactive substances gradually drew her national and international attention, and she was honored for her many achievements by the end of her life.

She died in 1934 because of illnesses brought on by her long exposure to radiation and was buried at the famous Panth.

Barbara McClintock (1902-1992)

1947 portrait of Barbara McClintock (1902-1992) an American geneticist who won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discovery of genetic transposition. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

(Image credit: Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

The study of chromosomes and their genetic expression earned Barbara McClintock the 1983 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Her theories about jumping genes are fundamental to a precise understanding of genetics.

McClintock was close to pursuing a career as a scientist. According to the website, her mother was reluctant to send her to Cornell because she didn't want to ruin her marriage prospects. Her father came to her rescue and allowed her to attend.

At Cornell, McClintock studied genetics, which was a relatively new field of study and one that very few women pursued. She followed this area of study as she continued her studies. She was a professor at the University of Missouri before becoming a researcher at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

Her greatest legacy is her studies in genetics. Her focus was on how genes control the color of maize. According to a 2012 article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she discovered the ability of a DNA sequence to change position on a genome. The idea of jumping genes came to be known as genetic transposition, and it was found that genes could only be passed on from generation to generation. By the 1960s, the scientific community had accepted her findings.

Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997)

Physics Professor Dr Chien-Shiung Wu in a laboratory at Columbia University. Dr. Wu became the first woman to win the Research Corporation Award after providing the first experimental proof, along with scientists from the National Bureau of Standards, that the principle of parity conservation does not hold in weak subatomic interactions.

(Image credit: Bettmann via Getty Images)

Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese American physicist famous for her work on weak subatomic interactions. She was involved in the Manhattan Project during World War II.

According to the National Park Service, Wu was born in China to parents who encouraged her scientific ambitions. She earned a degree in physics at National Central University after she excelled in math and science. She finished her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Instead of returning to China, she stayed in the United States and became the first female faculty member at the university.

During World War II, he was employed at Columbia University, where he worked on the Manhattan Project. The National Women's History Museum in Virginia states that her research focused on producing bomb-grade uranium by identifying a process using gaseous infusion to separate uranium metal. This was a crucial step in the process of turning a bomb into an atomic bomb.

The first woman to hold a tenured faculty position in the university&s physics department was the one who stayed at Columbia after the war. She died in New York City in 1997. The U.S. Postal Service put her on a postage stamp.

It was published on March 8, 2020. Tom Garlinghouse updated it on March 18, 2022.

Bibliography

The University of California, Berkeley has a history of Anning.

The New York Times has a story about a pioneer woman of science.

The Metamorphosis is an exhibition by the Royal Collection Trust.

Wallace White wrote "Her Deepness" in The New Yorker on June 25, 1989.

The Telegraph has a story about the elderly diver who spent two weeks living under water.

"Endeavour: NASA's youngest shuttle" was written by Elizabeth Howell.

Space.com has a biography of Mae Jemison.

In Photos: 8 toys that embrace diversity, was published by Livescience.com.

Livescience.com has a list of the nobel prize in physics.

Maria Goeppert-Mayer is an American physicist.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine: 1901-Present was published on October 7, 2019.

Rita Levi-Montalcini: biographical is a work by the author.

Medicine Plus has theNGF Gene, Nerve growth factor.

Breast Cancer: Symptoms, Treatment and Prevention was published by Live Science.com on March 13, 2015.

Rafi Letzter Live Science.com won a $3 million prize for their work.

Adam Mann and Robert Coolman talk about quantum mechanics on Live Science.

Jim Lucas, Live Science.com, "What Is Ultraviolet Light?", September 15, 2017:

Dr. Virginia Apgar is the author of " Keeping score at baby's first cry".

Human brain: facts, functions, and anatomy will be published by Live Science.com on May 28, 2021.

Live Science.com has a memory definition and types of memory.

The Canadian Association for Neuroscience has a website.

The mind of her own: Montreal neuroscientists on turning 100.

The World's 1st Computer Algorithm, written by Ada Lovelace, sold for $125,000 at an auction.

www.britannica.com has a biography ofDorothy Hodgkin.

There is a biography on the British-German Astronomer on thebritannica.com.

The Department of Mathematics at the college is led by Larry Riddle.

Dr.Patricia E. Bath is a physician.

The National Women's History Museum has a biography of Rachel Carson.

Pesticide turns male Frogs into females.

Duke University, electrical and computer engineering.

The prize of the nobel prize was given to Marie Curie.

Marie-Curie is a Polish-born French Physicist.

Barbara McClintock won the prize in 1983 for Physiology or Medicine.

The discovery of jumping genes was made by Barbara McClintock.

The National Women's History Museum has a biography of Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu.