[FOX Company]Science and women

Day 3,652, 05:45 • Published in United Kingdom Belgium • by mittekemuis



Under impulse from a generous invite by Feynmann to become honorary member of Fox Company, I figured I might as well participate in their drive to generate activity. They try to be very present on the battlefield but also in the media.

The assignment was:

“It could be a short biography of a famous scientist, some exciting new discovery, something curious, science facts ... anything you find interesting and is science related.”

I bring you awesome women who meant something for science but not necessarily were recognised for it.






Actress Hedy Lamarr was not only thought to be the most beautiful woman in the world but she was also a mathematician and inventor of frequency hopping spread spectrum, a technology used for Bluetooth and WiFi.

Hedy Lamarr was one of the pioneers of modern communication techniques. Through her first husband, who next to his main job as an arms dealer also was building planes and did research in operating systems, she got interested in radio communication. Early in the ‘40 she developed a method of radio communication which was rendered insensitive to outside interference by means of frequency hopping: the so-called Secret Communications System.
The invention was at first not accepted as genius not in the least because it was discovered by a woman. It was only from 1962 that this technology got implemented in military systems.

Her personal life was one of much tragedy. She was born under the name Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler and got married with the Viennese arms dealer Fritz Mandl. The marriage wasn’t a happy one because he was very jealous about his wife’s film carriere. She fled from her husband and took residence in London in 1937. source

Hedy Lamarr also made the history books for the first ever nude scene in a movie. The Czech film Extase was very controversial and banned in many countries.




The First Woman PhD in Computer Science Was a Nun. Sister Mary Kenneth Keller was born in Ohio in 1914 and took her vows in 1940. She went on with her studies at DePaul University where she received a B.S. in Mathematics and a M.S. in Mathematics and Physics. Sister Keller also studied at Purdue, the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College. In Dartmouth the rules of banning women out of the computer center got lifted which allowed Sister Keller to help develop the computer language BASIC. This computer language allowed anyone who learned it would be able to make computer programs.

My own first experience with computers was designing simple games on a Commodore 64 in BASIC language.


Keller’s dissertation, written in CDC FORTRAN 63 was titled “Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns.” In 1965, she became the first American woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science. Afterward she founded the computer science department at Clarke College in Iowa where she run the college for 20 years. Her main drive was providing access and information about computers to everyone not just computer scientists. She was convinced computers would make people smarter. Keller said, “For the first time, we can now mechanically simulate the cognitive process. We can make studies in artificial intelligence. Beyond that, this mechanism [the computer] can be used to assist humans in learning. As we are going to have more mature students in greater numbers as time goes on, this type of teaching will probably be increasingly important.”

Today the Clarke College has the Kenneth Keller Computer Science Scholarship in honour of Sister Keller. This educational center provides computing and telecommunication support to Clarke College students, the faculty members and the staff. source


She Was a Computer When Computers Wore Skirts.

Katherine G. Johnson was born Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. A bright child with a gift for numbers, she breezed through her classes and completed the eighth grade by age 10. Although her town didn’t offer classes for African Americans after that point, her father, Joshua, drove the family 120 miles to Institute, West Virginia, where they lived while she attended high school. Katherine skipped through grades to graduate from high school at 14, from college at 18. At West Virginia State College a young professor,W.W. Schiefflin Claytor who was the third African American to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics, got interested in Katherin and prepared her to become a research mathematician.

Katherine Johnson was 90 on Aug. 26, 2008 an apt date because it also was National Equality Day. Not that she ever thought she wasn't equal. Johnson said in an interview."I didn't have time for that. My dad taught us 'you are as good as anybody in this town, but you're no better.' I don't have a feeling of inferiority. Never had. I'm as good as anybody, but no better." But the fact is that she was a lot smarter than anyone. She was a "computer" at Langley Research Center. More important, she was living out her life's goal, though, when it became her goal, she wasn't sure what it involved.

The 'Computer'
Beginning in the late 1930s, Johnson taught math and French at schools in Virginia and West Virginia. In 1952, Johnson learned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was hiring African-American women to serve as "computers"; namely, people who performed and checked calculations for technological developments. Johnson applied, and the following year she was accepted for a position at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. After only two weeks, Johnson was transferred from the African-American computing pool to Langley's flight research division, where she talked her way into meetings and earned additional responsibilities.
She became a NASA Pioneer. In 1958 Johnson was among the people charged with determining how to get a human into space and back. For Johnson, calculating space flight came down to the basics of geometry. As a result, the task of plotting the path for Alan Shepard's 1961 journey to space, the first in American history, fell on her shoulders. The next challenge was to send a man in orbit around Earth. This involved far more difficult calculations, to account for the gravitational pulls of celestial bodies, and by then NASA had begun using electronic computers. Yet, the job wasn't considered complete until Johnson was summoned to check the work of the machines, providing the go-ahead to propel John Glenn into successful orbit in 1962.source

Katherine Johnson continued to serve as a key asset for NASA, helping to develop its Space Shuttle program and Earth Resources Satellite, until her retirement in 1986.
A movie was made about her and other African American woman at NASA who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history.





Maybe you never heard of these women maybe you did. For me they are idols even if I am not that smart and in no way can compare myself to them. They lived in a time where women were not seen as intellectuals. They had to be good looking housewifes who were judged on how well they could cook and entertain their husbands colleagues and friends. Lucky for us time has drastically changed although on International Women’s Day you get painfully aware that women are still not equals to men in the whole world. March 8th is still a few months away but I’ll remember to do another article on strong women then.