Women In Physics

This article discusses women who have made an important contribution to the field of physics.

Physics awards

Nobel laureates

* 1903 Marie Curie: "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel"
* 1963 Maria Goeppert Mayer: "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure"
* 2018 Donna Strickland: "for their method high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses"
* 2020 Andrea Ghez: "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy."

Four women have won the Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded annually since 1901 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Marie Curie was the first woman to receive the prize in 1903, along with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel - making her the only woman to be awarded two Nobel prizes (her second Nobel prize was in Chemistry in 1911). Maria Goeppert Mayer became the second woman to win the prize in 1963, for her contributions to understanding the nuclear shell structure. Donna Strickland was the third winner of the prize in 2018, for her work in high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses beginning in the 1980s with Gérard Mourou. Andrea Ghez was the fourth Nobel laureate in 2020, she shared one half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel for the discovery of the supermassive compact object Sagittarius A* at the center of our galaxy, the other half awarded to Roger Penrose for theoretical work regarding black hole formation.

Physicists and physicochemists that won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry include Marie Curie, Irène Joliot-Curie, daughter of Marie Curie, in 1935, and Dorothy Hodgkin in 1964. Nuclear physicist Rosalyn Sussman Yalow was the second female scientist to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1977 for the development of radioimmunoassays.

Nobel nominees

Other physicists were nominated to the Nobel Prize in Physics but did not receive it, including:

* Lise Meitner, nominated 19 times;
* Marietta Blau, nominated 3 times;
* Hertha Wambacher, nominated once;
* Chien-Shiung Wu, nominated 5 times;
* Margaret Burbidge nominated once;
* and Janine Connes, nominated once.

Irène Joliot-Curie and Dorothy Hodgkin were also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics, but received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 and 1964, respectively.

Aside from the named above, other physicists and physicochemists that were nominated to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry but dit not receive it, include Ida Noddack, Marguerite Perey, Alberte Pullman, and Erika Cremer.

Wolf Prize in physics

Two women have been awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics:

* 1978 Chien-Shiung Wu, "for her explorations of the weak interaction, helping establish the precise form and the non-conservation of parity for this natural force."
* 2022 Anne L'Huillier, "for pioneering contributions to ultrafast laser science and attosecond physics".

Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

Women who have been awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics include:

* 2018 WMAP Probe team, 27 listed members, including Hiranya Peiris, Licia Verde, Janet L. Weiland and Joanna Dunkley for "For detailed maps of the early universe that greatly improved our knowledge of the evolution of the cosmos and the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies."
* 2018 Special recognition to Jocelyn Bell Burnell for "For fundamental contributions to the discovery of pulsars, and a lifetime of inspiring leadership in the scientific community."

Timeline

Antiquity

* : Aglaonice became the first female astronomer to be recorded in Ancient Greece.

* c. 355–415 CE: Greek astronomer, mathematician and philosopher, Hypatia became renowned as a respected academic teacher, editor of Ptolemy's ''Almagest'' astronomical data, and head of her own science academy.

17th century

*1668: After separating from her husband, French polymath Marguerite de la Sablière established a popular salon in Paris. Scientists and scholars from different countries visited the salon regularly to discuss ideas and share knowledge, and Sablière studied physics, astronomy and natural history with her guests.
*1680: French astronomer Jeanne Dumée published a summary of arguments supporting the Copernican theory of heliocentrism. She wrote "between the brain of a woman and that of a man there is no difference".
*1693–1698: German astronomer and illustrator Maria Clara Eimmart created more than 350 detailed drawings of the moon phases.

18th century

*1732: At the age of 20, Italian physicist Laura Bassi became the first female member of the Bologna Academy of Sciences. One month later, she publicly defended her academic theses and received a PhD. Bassi was awarded an honorary position as professor of physics at the University of Bologna. She was the first female physics professor in the world.
*1738: French polymath Émilie du Châtelet became the first woman to have a paper published by the Paris Academy, following a contest on the nature of fire.
*1740: Émilie du Châtelet published ''Institutions de Physique'', or ''Foundations of Physics'', providing a metaphysical basis for Newtonian physics.
*1751: 19-year-old Italian physicist Cristina Roccati received her PhD from the University of Bologna.
*1776: At the University of Bologna, Italian physicist Laura Bassi became the first woman appointed as chair of physics at a university.

19th century

*1816: French mathematician and physicist Sophie Germain became the first women to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her work on elasticity theory.
*1828: Caroline Herschel, sister of William Herschel, becomes the first woman to publish in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and is awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
*1835: Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville became the first female Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society.
*1891: Agnes Pockels, gets help from Rayleigh to publish her first paper on nature of surface tension. There she first introduces the concept of the Pockels point and pioneers the field of surface science.
*1897: American physicist Isabelle Stone became the first woman to receive a PhD in physics in the United States. She wrote her dissertation "On the Electrical Resistance of Thin Films" at the University of Chicago.
*1898: Danish physicist Kirstine Meyer was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.
*1899: Irish physicist Edith Anne Stoney was appointed a physics lecturer at the London School of Medicine for Women, becoming the first woman medical physicist. She later became a pioneering figure in the use of x-ray machines on the front lines of World War I.
*1899: American physicists Marcia Keith and Isabelle Stone became charter members of the American Physical Society.

20th century

1900s

*1903: Marie Curie was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize; she received the Nobel Prize in Physics along with her husband, Pierre Curie "for their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel", and Henri Becquerel, "for his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity".
*1900: Physicists Marie Curie and Isabelle Stone attended the first International Congress of Physics in Paris, France. They were the only two women out of 836 participants.
*1906: English physicist, mathematician and engineer Hertha Ayrton became the first female recipient of the Hughes Medal from the Royal Society of London. She received the award for her experimental research on electric arcs and sand ripples.
*1909: Danish physicist Kristine Meyer became the first Danish woman to receive a doctorate degree in natural sciences. She wrote her dissertation on the topic of "the development of the temperature concept" within the history of physics.

1910s

*1911: Marie Curie became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which she received " orthe discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element". This made her the only woman to win two Nobel Prizes.
* 1912: Astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt studied the bright-dim cycle periods of Cepheid stars, then found a way to calculate the distance from such stars to Earth.
*1918: Emmy Noether created Noether's theorem explaining the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.
*1919: Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen proves the Bohr–Van Leeuwen theorem in her thesis explaining why magnetism is an essentially quantum mechanical effect.

1920s

*1922: the International Astronomical Union adopts the stellar classification used by Annie Jump Cannon. She came up with the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures and spectral types.
*1925: Annie Jump Cannon became the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate of science from Oxford University.
*1925: Astronomer and astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin established that hydrogen is the most common element in stars, and thus the most abundant element in the universe.
*1926: Katharine Burr Blodgett was the first women to earn a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge.
*1926: The first application of quantum mechanics to molecular systems was done by Lucy Mensing. She studied the rotational spectrum of diatomic molecules using the methods of matrix mechanics.

1930s

*1935: Katharine Burr Blodgett improves Irving Langmuir experimental set up leading to the development of the Langmuir–Blodgett trough and the discovery of the Langmuir–Blodgett films.
*1936: Danish seismologist and geophysicist Inge Lehmann discovered that the Earth has a solid inner core distinct from its molten outer core.
*1937: Marietta Blau and her student Hertha Wambacher, both Austrian physicists, received the Lieben Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for their work on cosmic ray observations using the technique of nuclear emulsions.
*1939: Lise Meitner helped lead a small group of scientists who first discovered the nuclear fission of uranium when it absorbed an extra neutron.
*1939: French physicist Marguerite Perey discovered francium.

1940s

*c. 1940: Elizabeth Alexander and Ruby Payne-Scott become the first women to work in radio astronomy. Making important results on the study of radar signals coming from the sun.

*1941: Ruby Payne-Scott joined the Radio Physics Laboratory of the Australia Government's CSIRO; she was the first woman radio astronomer.
*1942: Chicago Pile-1 led by Enrico Fermi, the first nuclear reactor reaches criticality. Leona Woods was the only woman in the team and she was instrumental in the construction and then utilization of geiger counters for analysis during experimentation.
*1943: the Manhattan project hires the Calutron Girls, a large group of young girls to monitor dials and watch meters for calutrons, mass spectrometers adapted for separation of uranium isotopes, unaware of the purpose of the project.
*1945: American physicists and mathematicians Frances Spence, Ruth Teitelbaum, Marlyn Meltzer, Betty Holberton, Jean Bartik and Kathleen Antonelli programmed the electronic general-purpose computer ENIAC, becoming some of the world's first computer programmers.
*1947: Berta Karlik, an Austrian physicist, was awarded the Haitinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for her discovery of Astatine
*1947: Hilda Hänchen, in collaboration with Fritz Goos, demonstrates a new optical phenomena, now known as the Goos–Hänchen effect.
*1949: Rosemary Brown (later Fowler), a student of C.F. Powell at the University of Bristol, discovers the k-meson in what Heisenberg calls "most beautiful" pictures of cosmic ray tracks from the Jungfraujoch (the 'k' track in Brown, R. et al. Nature, 163, 47 (1949). This discovery and the prior finding of a very similar particle in 1947 led to the "τ–θ puzzle", the discovery of parity violation in weak interactions, and hence the Standard Model.

1950s

*1952: Photograph 51, an X-ray diffraction image of crystallized DNA, was taken by Raymond Gosling in May 1952, working as a PhD student under the supervision of British chemist and biophysicist Rosalind Franklin; it was critical evidence in identifying the structure of DNA.
*1954: Janine Connes pioneers the new field of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy for astronomy.
*1954: Sulamith Goldhaber, along with her husband Gerson Goldhaber, start a series of important experiments to measure the properties of the K meson.
*1955: the results of the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou simulation is published in Los Alamos National Laboratory. It was coded by Mary Tsingou using the MANIAC I computer working with Enrico Fermi, John Pasta, and Stanislaw Ulam in the Manhattan Project. It represents one of the first computational experiments in mathematics and chaos theory.
*1956: Chinese-American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu conducted a nuclear physics experiment in collaboration with the Low Temperature Group of the US National Bureau of Standards. The experiment, becoming known as the Wu experiment, showed that parity could be violated in weak interaction.
*1957: Margaret Burbidge releases the landmark B2FH paper as first author along with Geoffrey Burbidge, William A. Fowler, and Fred Hoyle. The paper reviewed stellar nucleosynthesis theory and identified nucleosynthesis processes that are responsible for producing the elements heavier than iron and explained their relative abundances.
*1958: Olga Ladyzhenskaya provides the first rigorous proofs of the convergence of a finite difference method for the Navier–Stokes equations.

1960s

*1960: American medical physicist Rosalyn Yalow received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones" along with Roger Guillemin and Andrew V. Schally who received it "for their discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain".
*1962: French physicist Marguerite Perey became the first female Fellow elected to the Académie des Sciences.
*1963: Maria Goeppert Mayer became the first American woman to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics; she shared the prize with J. Hans D. Jensen "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure” and Eugene Paul Wigner "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles".
*1964: Chien-Shiung Wu spoke at MIT about gender discrimination.
*1967: Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell co-discovered the first radio pulsars.''The New York Times'' Almost Famous: Featuring: Jocelyn Bell Burnel
(2021) I Changed Astronomy Forever. He Won the Nobel Prize for It.
16:16

1970s

* 1970: Astronomer Vera Rubin published the first evidence for dark matter.

*1971 Mina Rees became the first woman president of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) founded in 1848.
*1972: Willie Hobbs Moore became the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in physics.
*1972: Sandra Faber became the first woman to join the Lick Observatory staff at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
*1973: American physicist Anna Coble became the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in biophysics, completing her dissertation at University of Illinois.
*1975: Mary K. Gaillard, working with Benjamin W. Lee and Jonathan L. Rosner, predicts the mass of the charm quark before it was measured. She will later also predict the mass of the bottom quark.
*1975: María Teresa Ruiz, becomes the first woman to obtain a PhD in astrophysics at Princeton University.
*1977: Helen Quinn develops the Peccei–Quinn theory as one of the first possible solutions to the strong CP problem, in collaboration with Roberto Peccei.
*1978: Chien-Shiung Wu becomes the first laureate of Wolf Prize in Physics for her help with the development of the Standard Model.

1980s

*1980: Nigerian geophysicist Deborah Ajakaiye became the first woman in any West African country to be appointed a full professor of physics. Over the course of her scientific career, she became the first female Fellow elected to the Nigerian Academy of Science, and the first female dean of science in Nigeria.
*1980: Mary K. Gaillard produces a report at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) addressing the fact that just 3% of the staff were women. She called for the elimination of gender discrimination through equality in promotion, maternity leave and full-day child care.
*1981: Mary K. Gaillard becomes the first woman with a tenured position in the physics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.
*1985: Mildred Dresselhaus was appointed the first women Institute Professor at MIT
*1986: Maria Goeppert Mayer Award was awarded for the first time to honor young female physicists at the beginning of their careers
*1986 Jean M. Bennett became the first woman president of The Optical Society founded in 1916.

1990s

*1992: Claudine Hermann first woman to be appointed professor at École Polytechnique.
*1995: Reva Williams works out the Penrose process for rotating black holes.
*1999: Lisa Randall published the Randall–Sundrum model, with Raman Sundrum.
*2000: Mildred Dresselhaus became the director of the Office of Science at the United States Department of Energy.

21st century

2000s

*2001: Lene Hau stopped a beam of light completely
*2003: American geophysicist Claudia Alexander oversaw the final stages of Project Galileo, a space exploration mission that ended at the planet Jupiter.
*2003: Deborah S. Jin and her team were the first to condense pairs of fermionic atoms
*2003: Physicists Ayşe Erzan, Karimat El-Sayed, Li Fanghua, Mariana Weissmann and Anneke Levelt Sengers win the first L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Awards in physical sciences.
*2005: Myriam Sarachik becomes the first woman to win the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize for her contributions to quantum spin dynamics and spin coherence in condensed matter systems, along with David Awschalom and Gabriel Aeppli..
*2007: Physicist Ibtesam Badhrees was the first Saudi Arabian woman to become a member of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
*2009: Margaret Reid becomes the first woman to win the Moyal Medal fromm Macquarie University, for her In 2019, her work on how to demonstrate the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox using squeezing and parametric down conversion.

2010s

*2011: Taiwanese-American astrophysicist Chung-Pei Ma led a team of scientists in discovering two of the largest black holes ever observed.
*2013: Nashwa Eassa founded the NGO Sudanese Women in Sciences.
*2014: American theoretical physicist Shirley Anne Jackson was awarded the National Medal of Science. Jackson had been the first African-American woman to receive a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during the early 1970s, and the first woman to chair the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
*2014: Amanda Barnard becomes the first woman to win the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology for her computational simulations on diamond nanoparticles.
*2015: Rabia Salihu Sa'id received the Elsevier Foundation Award for Women Scientist in the Developing World.
*2016: Fabiola Gianotti became the first woman Director-General of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research)
*2018: British astrophysicists Hiranya Peiris and Joanna Dunkley and Italian cosmologist Licia Verde were among 27 scientists awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their contributions to "detailed maps of the early universe that greatly improved our knowledge of the evolution of the cosmos and the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies".
* 2018: British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell received the special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her scientific achievements and “inspiring leadership”, worth $3 million. She donated the entirety of the prize money towards the creation of scholarships to assist women, underrepresented minorities and refugees who are pursuing the study of physics.
*2018: Canadian physicist Donna Strickland received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics"; she shared it with Arthur Ashkin and Gérard Mourou.
*2018: For the first time in history, women received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel Prize in Physics in the same year.
*2019: Mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck became the first woman to win the Abel Prize for "her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory, and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics."

2020s

*2020: American astrophysicist Andrea M. Ghez received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy." She shared half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel, while the other half was awarded to Roger Penrose.
*2020: German geoscientist Ingeborg Levin was the first woman to receive the Alfred Wegener medal from the European Geosciences Union "for fundamental contributions to our present knowledge and understanding of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including the global carbon cycle."
*2020: Françoise Combes becomes the first female astrophysicist to win the CNRS Gold Medal, highest degree in research by the French government.
*2022: French-Swedish physicist Anne L’Huillier becomes the second female scientist to receive the Wolf Prize in Physics “for pioneering contributions to ultrafast laser science and attosecond physics”.
*2022: Astronomer Ewine van Dishoeck is awarded the UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal.
*2023: Professor Polina Bayvel becomes the first woman to win the Rumford Medal by the Royal Society.

See also

*Timeline of women in science
*Timeline of women in science in the United States
*Women in NASA
*Women in science
*Women in the workforce

History of physics

References

{{History of physics
Lists of women scientists
Physics
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