International Women’s Day 2020 falls on Sunday, 8th March this year. In the run up to this date, each week day we’ll be highlighting one woman whose accomplishments in science, technology, engineering and/or mathematics not only elevated their fields but also took us one step closer to a gender-equal world. We hope you’ll join us over the next four weeks as we celebrate some landmark achievements in STEM, one woman at a time.

As we work through our list of twenty women to highlight this year, we invite you to explore 17 prominent women in mathematics and 15 influential women in computer science.

Caroline Herschel (1750-1848)

Caroline Herschel is considered to be the first female astronomer and a pioneer in the field. She began noting observations for her first book in 1782, and a year later she detected three nebulae by telescope. In 1786, at age 36, she became the first woman to discover a comet. But her early life saw her overcome significant obstacles to her success.

At 10 she contracted typhus, which stunted her growth (she stood at just 4’3”) and led to vision loss in her left eye. Her mother opposed her education, believing Caroline wouldn’t marry, and felt it best she train to be a house servant. Happily that did not come to pass, as she would join her brothers in Bath, England.

Her brother William tutored her in mathematics. She aided in his astronomical research, which included the discovery of the planet Uranus In 1781. At times her relationship with her brother was tense, but in 1787 she became the first woman to receive a salary for services to science and earned her long-held desire for independence. She was recognized for her work, independently of her brother, when she spent a week as a guest of the British royal family twelve years later.

In 1798 she presented an index to John Flamsteed’s observations to the Royal Society, a record of 560 stars omitted from the British Catalogue – and a list of errata from that publication. After her brother’s death in 1822, Caroline returned to her hometown of Hannover, Germany, and proceeded to catalogue star clusters and 2,500 nebulae.

Caroline was awarded the Astronomical Society’s gold medal in 1829 for an unpublished revision and reorganization of their work. In 1835 she was elected – with Mary Somerville – as an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society; they were the first women members. And in 1846, when she was 96 years of age, the King of Prussia awarded her the Gold Medal for Science.

Rebecca Lee Crumpler (1831–1895)

Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler was the first black woman to become a medical doctor in the United States. She was raised in Pennsylvania by an aunt who acted as a healer and carer to neighbors in their community, which inspired Rebecca’s interest in pursuing a career in healing.

In 1852 Rebecca moved to Charlestown, Massachusetts, where she worked as a nurse for eight years before she was then accepted into the New England Female Medical College. This was a time where opportunities were limited both for women and for African-Americans. However in 1860, due to the demand for physicians to treat Civil War veterans, this was slowly starting to change medicine. That year there were a total of 300 female medical physicians in the US, though all were white women.

Once Rebecca graduated as a Doctor of Medicine she started practising in Boston, focusing her efforts on poor African-American women and children. She later moved to Virginia in 1865 to continue this work, with the additional goal to provide care to the freed slaves who were being turned away by the white doctors.

She faced both sexual and racial discrimination throughout her career but she didn’t let this deter her efforts. In 1883 she published one of the first medical books from an African-American author, entitled A Book of Medical Discourses based on notes from her years of practice.

Nettie Stevens (1861–1912)

Nettie Stevens was one of the earliest scientists working in the field of genetics, best known for the discovery of the sex chromosomes.

After university Nettie initially worked as a teacher before later returning to further education at a number of institutes. While studying at the Zoological Institute in Germany she worked with Theodor Boveri, who specialized in hereditary biology, which sparked Nettie’s interest in researching chromosomes.

Nettie conducted research at leading marine stations and laboratories, which led to 38 different publications, and numerous major discoveries. The most impactful of these was her discovery of the sex chromosomes. She noted the difference between XX chromosomes and XY chromosome present in the different sexes, and from this established the role these chromosomes played in determining the sex of babies in the womb.

While Nettie was one of the earliest women in the USA to be recognized for her contributions to science, during her lifetime much of the credit for her major discoveries were unfairly attributed to Edmund Wilson, a genetics working independently from Nettie, who had read her research and used her findings as the basis of his own work.

Marie Curie (1867-1934)

Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and was the first person (and still the only woman) to win it twice – once in physics and once in chemistry. She is without a doubt one of the most imposing figures in the history of the fields, voted in a 2009 poll to be ‘the most inspirational woman in science.’

Born in Poland, Marie read French, German and Polish poets, giving lessons to earn money as a teenager. In 1891 she moved to Paris, studying physics and the Sarbonne and graduating in 1893 at the top of her class. She married Pierre Curie in 1895, with whom she shared her Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903.

Marie’s achievements are vast and deserve more room than we can give them here, so we encourage you to read this more comprehensive look at her life and her research. She was the first person to produce the term ‘radioactivity’ following her research in the late 1890s, having developed a hypothesis that radiation did not result from the interaction of molecules but from the atom. She developed techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes and discovered the elements polonium (named after her home country) and radium. She was the first faculty member at the École Normale Supérieure who was a woman. The Curie Institutes of Paris and Warsaw are still responsible for important medical research today, founded in 1920 and 1932 respectively. Marie also developed mobile radiography units during the first Wold War, allowing field hospitals the ability to use X-rays.

Her Nobel Prize for physics, shared with her husband Pierre and Professor Henri Becquerel, was originally only to be presented to the two men. But Swedish mathematician Magnus Goesta Mittag-Leffler, a member of the committee, noted this to Pierre and he was able to ensure Marie was rightfully awarded her first Nobel Prize. Her second Nobel Prize was awarded ‘in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element’, and the notoriety gave her the status to rally support for the Radium Institute.

Marie died in 1934 as a result of long-term exposure to radiation, as the effects of close proximity to ionizing radiation were not known at the time. She had carried tubes of radioactive isotopes in her pocket; stored them in her desk drawer; was unshielded while providing X-Ray services in field hospitals. Her research – and even her cookbook – from the late 1890s are all considered to be too dangerous to handle, even now.

Lise Meitner (1878-1968)

Lise Meitner, dubbed the “German Marie Curie” by Albert Einstein, was a physicist known for her research in radioactivity and nuclear physics – specifically nuclear fission. She received many honors and awards throughout her life as well as posthumously.

Early in her career, Lise became the assistant to Max Planck and worked with chemist Otto Hahn. Together with Hahn she discovered several new isotopes and published papers on beta radiation. In 1913 she was finally granted a permanent position at the Kaiser Wilhem Institute. She was awarded the Leibniz Medal in 1917 for her discovery of an isotope of protactinium. She discovered the Auger effect in 1922, although this effect is named after Victor Auger, a French scientist who discovered the effect a year later.

Lise was the first woman in Germany to be a professor of physics, earning this role in 1926. She would flee Germany in 1938 as antisemitism and the Nazi regime imposed ever harsher and more dangerous laws and restrictions on the Jewish population.

Along with Otto Hahn and Otto Robert, Lise discovered nuclear fission of uranium. Their research fed directly into some of the most notable developments in the display of power in the 20th century: the creation of nuclear reactors as sources of power as well as the development of nuclear weapons. Only Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in spite of their collaboration, but when she had been forced to flee the country Hahn gave her a diamond ring he had inherited from his mother. She was instructed to use it to bribe border guards if necessary. While she would eventually downplay her role in the research that led to Hahn’s Nobel Prize, she was not kind to him about his passive resistance to the Nazi regime in a June 1945 letter – which he did not receive. Even so, they remained close friends.

Additional awards earned by Lise include the Lieben Prize (1925), the Max Planck Medal (1949), the Otto Hahn Prize (1955), the ForMemRS (1960) and the Enrico Fermi Award (1966.) She had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 19 times. Element 109 was named meitnerium in her honour. The biannual Lise Meitner Prize was established in 2000, awarded for excellent research in nuclear science. Since 2006 the Gothenburg Lise Meitner Award is given annually to a scientist who has made a breakthrough in physics. The Austrian Physical Society and the Germany Physical Society have organised a series of public talks, presented by female physicists, every year since 2008. In the United Kingdom, the Institute of Physics established the Meitner Medal for public engagement within physics. And in 2017, the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the United States named a major nuclear energy research program after her.

Edith Clarke (1883–1959)

Edith Clarke was a pioneer in electrical engineering, whose work focused on the developments of mathematical methods to simplify, and improve, the designs and operations of large power systems. Edith broke a lot of ground for women in the field of Engineering. Including, but not limited to, being the first woman in the USA to be:

• Employed as an electrical engineer
• A professor of electrical engineering
• A Fellow at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

Edith initially studied mathematics and astronomy, but after a brief career as a teacher she went back to study civil engineering, and then Electrical Engineering. However after graduating she struggled to find work in engineering and spent years working as a human “computer”. She never gave up on her interest in engineering, and during this time she invented the Clarke calculator – a graphic calculator designed to solve electric power transmission line problems.

In 1922 Edith was finally employed as an electrical engineer, and by 1926 was the first woman to present a paper to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. Her paper was a continuation of her work on transmission lines, which were becoming longer and increasingly overworked. Edith presented a mathematical technique which could model a power system and reveal the behaviors on large systems.

In addition to receiving two patents, Edith also wrote numerous papers over her lifetime, and authored a textbook for engineering schools. She was posthumously included into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2015

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900–1979)

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was an astronomer and astrophysicist, best known as the first person to propose that stars were made up primarily of hydrogen and helium.

Cecilia earned a full scholarship at Cambridge University where she studied physics and chemistry (as well as botany during her first year) – however she was not granted an official degree after completing her studies as Cambridge still had not yet begun to award degrees to women.
While at Cambridge she attended a lecture by Arthur Eddington about his work photographing stars close to a solar eclipse in 1919 as a test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It was this lecture which led to “a complete transformation of my world picture” and the start of Cecilia’s interest and career in astronomy.

Due to a lack of career options for women in science in the United Kingdom, Cecilia looked to the United States for her graduate studies, and in 1922 she became the second woman to sign up for a fellowship at Harvard College Observatory, which was set up to encourage women to study there.

In 1925 she completed her doctoral thesis where she first hypothesized that stars were made up mostly of hydrogen and helium. This was accurate and ground-breaking work, however it contradicted the commonly held belief of scientists at the time, who believed that the Sun was elementally similar to Earth. This led to her thesis being initially rejected, until later independent research helped prove the accuracy of her work.

Barbara McClintock (1902-1992)

Barbara McClintock was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for her discovery of mobile genetic elements. This was 35 years after her first published report of transposition, so controversial were her findings. Her discovery in 1948 challenged the foundations of genetics, very much placing Barbara as a cytogeneticist who was ahead of her time.

Barbara’s research focused on the genetics of maize, beginning in the late 1920s and continuing throughout her career. Her work had always focused on the relationship between plant reproduction and ensuing mutation, and her breakthrough contribution to science was how chromosomes could “move” within genes during maize plant breeding.

This pioneering research proved how genes can control physical characteristics – in maize specifically this could be for color of leaves or individual kernels – and Barbara’s theories explained how genetic information could display or not display from generation to generation. These discoveries resulted in skepticism from some and hostility from others; the accepted state of genetics at this point in the 1950s was that mutations permanently inactivated genes and that genes were mapped linearly, so the concept that they could move within the genome went against all that was known about molecular biology at the time. In spite of being recognized as one of the preeminent scientists in the field, she felt marginalized for her findings and stopped publishing her data in 1953, later stating that she believed it was only a matter of time until people believed the evidence. It was only in the 1960s and 70s that her research was finally understood.

Barbara’s life-long work in genetics illustrated her passion for her research, and while the recognition of her most revolutionary discovery took decades she was always considered a distinguished and renowned scientist in her field, winning numerous awards between the 1940s and 1980s. Among these distinctions include being the first woman awarded the National Medal of Science (1970), the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (1983) and in 1986 was elected into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Her achievements and recognitions were vast, and for someone whose ground-breaking research unlocked the way we understand DNA, genes and chromosomes today – they are highly deserved indeed.

Joan Clarke (1917-1996) 

Joan Murray, born Joan Clarke, was an English cryptanalyst and numismatist whose invaluable work helped to break the German Enigma Code at Bletchley Park during WWII.

From 1936-1939 Joan Clarke attended Cambridge University, studying mathematics – though as a woman she was never awarded her full degree. While at Cambridge her intelligence bought her to the attention of Gordon Welchman, one of the top mathematicians working at Bletchley Park. He was impressed by Joan’s abilities with numbers, and he swiftly recruited her to join the efforts cracking the enigma code after her graduation.

She started in a team of all women, doing routine clerical work but her skill with numbers and cryptology had her quickly progress to become the only female expert on Banburismus (Turning’s cryptanalytic process), and by 1944 Joan was named the deputy head of Hut 8. This was a limited victory for Joan as she was still earning less than the men were, and had no chance of any further career progression beyond this.

Joan worked here until the end of the war, providing invaluable aid the war efforts for which she was awarded an MBE in 1947. However due to the Official Secrets Act her work was to remain secret even after the war. She went on to work for Government Communications Headquarters until her retirement in 1977.

Joan Clarke is also known for her close friendship to Alan Turning. The pair were even engaged for a time until Turning called it off. (Joan being fully aware of Turning’s sexual orientation during this time.) Joan later married Colonel J.K. Murray in 1952, changing her name to Joan Murray.

Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958)

Rosalind Franklin was a chemist whose innovative uses of x-ray diffraction and work on DNA led to the discovery of the structure of DNA

Rosalind knew from the age of 15 that she wanted to be chemistry, and despite her father’s attempts to dissuade her from this career path pursued her interests in studying chemistry at university and went on to earn a Ph.D. in physical chemistry.

She first learnt X-ray diffraction working in Paris, and would later use these skills in her research at King’s College London, applying them to the study and photography of DNA structure with X-ray diffraction.She and her student, Raymond Gosling, discovered in the resulting images that there were two forms of DNA, a dry “A” form and a wet “B” form. The most famous of these photos was Photograph 51 – which was taken using 100 hours of X-ray exposure from a machine Franklin had specially adapted for the purpose.

However one of Rosalind’s colleagues took Photograph 51 without her knowledge or permission, and shared it with to competing chemists James Watson and Francis Crick who were working on DNA at Cambridge at the time. They used the discoveries shown in this image to create their famous model of DNA which they published in 1953, and would later earn them a Nobel Prize. They never credited Rosalind Franklin for her part in their research.

In 1953 Rosalind Franklin left King’s College but only on the condition she stopped her work on DNA. She instead turned her attentions to studying the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. Within the next five years she published seventeen papers on viruses and, alongside her research team, laid the foundations for the study of structural virology. Sadly during this time, in 1956, Rosalind was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She kept working for the following years while she underwent treatment, but after a brief remission she passed away in April of 1958, aged only 37.

Mary Jackson (1921–2005)

Mary Jackson is a mathematician and aerospace engineer whose work on Project Mercury – the first human spaceflight program for the United States – helped the country win the long game of the Space Race. In an era defined by discrimination and limited opportunities for anyone who wasn’t a white male (Mary required a special permit just to take after-hours engineering courses for a program of which she was a part) she was an exemplar of dedication, tenacity and of lifting up her contemporaries.

One of the “computers with skirts” or “West Computers” for NACA (and eventually NASA), Mary worked with Christine Darden, Dorothy Vaughan and Katharine Johnson. She became NASA’s first black female engineer in 1958, her published research focusing on the boundary layer of air around aircraft and its behavior – flow, thrust, drag. She was a NASA engineer for 21 years.

Frustrated by reaching the most senior title she would attain as an engineer for NASA, she would choose a demotion and become an equal opportunity specialist, working to highlight and encourage the hiring and promotion of women and other minorities who deserved more acclaim in the fields of science, engineering and mathematics at NASA. Mary used her influence to ensure the path was easier for those who came after.

Along with the aforementioned Vaughan and Johnson, Mary’s story was told as part of the film (and book upon which the film was based) Hidden Figures. She was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2019.

Cathleen Morawetz (1923-2017)

Cathleen Morawetz may have had a wider impact on the world than her family, which (should you choose to have a look) has been impressive. Cathleen’s theorems, however, were utilised to help solve real-world engineering problems; her work in partial differential equations, aerodynamics, supersonic flows and shock waves changed the way we think about aircraft design.

Airplanes traveling at supersonic speeds cause shockwaves to develop, resulting in supersonic booms. But even when travelling at subsonic speeds, the air flowing past a wing can be partly subsonic and partly supersonic, resulting in shock waves that can reduce the speed of an aircraft. There were questions about whether wings could be designed to eliminate these shocks, but Cathleen’s research proved that it couldn’t be done and that it was actually better to design wings to minimize shock but not attempt to eliminate it entirely.

Her research in this area, as well as scattering theory, resulted in the ‘Morawetz inequality’ (the maximum amount of wave energy near an object at any given time) and the ‘Morawetz estimate’ (more of a vague term, best defined in context). As a colleague she was considered generous in her research and ideas, relentless in her search for solutions, original in how her mind approached problems, and unstoppable in terms of her ability to balance her career and her personal life (which included being a mother of four).

Cathleen was presented with many awards and honors throughout her life. She receive the Lester R. Ford Award in 1981, became the first woman to deliver the Gibbs Lecture for the American Mathematical Society, she was awarded the Jeffery-Williams Prize in 1984, in 1998 she became the first woman the National Medal of Science for her mathematical achievements, in 2004 she was presented the Leroy P. Steele Prize, was awarded the Birkhoff Prize in 2006, and in 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley (1933-present)

Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley is a philanthropist and business woman who built her career as an information technology pioneer, creating one of the first software startups in the UK.

Born as Vera Buchthal in Germany, she moved to England aged five with her older sister, as Kindertransport refugees at the start of WWII, where they were raised by a foster family. As a child she fell in love with mathematics, and successfully argued to be allowed to attend the local boys’ school to be able to study it.

In the 50s, at aged 18 she changed her name to Stephanie Brook, and started out her career at Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill building computers and writing machine code, while she obtained an honours degree in mathematics through evening classes.  In 1959 she moved to work at CDL Ltd though she left in 1962 after her marriage to physicist Derek Shirley, who also worked at the company. Married couples were not permitted to work together in the public sector at this time, and Stephanie was aware that her opportunity for career progression as a woman was very limited there.

Stephanie made the risky decision to start her own business, and with just £6 (the equivalent of just under £130 in 2020) she created a company specialising in selling software, and grew it into a multi-million pound company. Early in her career Stephanie begun to operate her business using her family nickname ‘Steve’ as she learnt that by doing so her correspondences would receive a better response in the male-dominated industry. Because of the difficulties she faced, she chose to employ almost exclusively women to her workforce – many of them working from home – until the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act made this illegal.

In 1986 Stephanie set up The Shirley Foundation in memoriam to her late son, with the purpose of helping those on the autism spectrum to live full lives. Since her retirement Stephanie has donated most of her wealth to this cause.

Karen Uhlenbeck (1942-present)

Karen Uhlenbeck describes herself as a messy reader and a messy thinker – descriptions illustrated by the piles of reading materials on her desk at Princeton – but this is all just surface detail to what has been a career of defining the unity between geometry and analysis.

Over the course of Karen’s career – the last 40 years – she has been credited with some of mathematics’ most important advances. Her work has launched and defined the field of geometric analysis, a discipline using differential equations to study solutions to differential geometry – and vice versa. Her research into bubbling analysis was called revolutionary. Her work with mathematician Jonathan Sacks was dubbed transformative. Her results in gauge theory are the foundation upon which new research is laid. Mathematician Simon Donaldson – whose subsequent work in areas of Uhlenbeck’s research led him to receive a Fields Medal in 1986 – described her work as developing ‘a wide-ranging impact in many branches of differential geometry over the last few decades and forms the focus of much current research activity.’ She also had her hands in the work of Edward Witten, who was awarded his Fields Medal in 1990 at the International Congress of Mathematicians…a conference at which Karen was the second woman (after Emmy Noether) to be a plenary speaker.

Describing all of her work would take more space than we have available here, but this article from Quanta magazine is a wonderful resource if you’re interested in learning more.

Karen became the first woman to receive the Abel Prize in 2019, but this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the prizes and awards she has earned for her pioneering work. She became a MacArthur Fellow and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983 and 1985 respectively. In 1986 she was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2000 she won the National Medal of Science and in 2007 the Leroy P. Steele Prize. In 2020 the Association for Women in Mathematics included her in their class of AWM Fellows – the organisation for which she was the Noether Lecturer in 1988.

Christine Darden (1942–present)

Dr Christine Darden is an American mathematician, data analyst, and aeronautical engineer who spent the majority of her career working at NASA specializing in aerodynamics, researching supersonic flight and sonic booms.

She graduated with a master’s degree in mathematics and after a few years spent teaching and working as a research assistant before moving to the Langley Research Center at the precursor to NASA, in 1967.

For eight years she worked there as a computer, solving complex equations and writing the programmes, both of which were integral parts of NASA’s operations. But Christine wanted the chance to work on her own research, and finally she approached one of the directors for answers on why all women were all assigned roles as computers, where they could not work on any research of their own, publish papers, or give talks on their work; while the men went straight to the position of engineers and were given all these opportunities.

Three weeks later she was promoted into the role of an engineer, and from there her career continued to flourish. Her work led to a new aerodynamics design to produce low-boom sonic effects, she was awarded a PhD in engineering, published numerous research articles, and then in 1989 she was appointed as leader of the Sonic Boom Team. Her research here focused on creating designs to decrease the negative effects of sonic booms, like noise pollution and damage to the ozone layer.

She was the first African-American woman at NASA to be promoted to the role of Senior Executive Service(the highest position available in the federal civil service and equivalent to general officer in the U.S. Armed Forces).

Adele Goldberg (1945-present)

Adele Goldberg taught herself to program unit record machines while on break when, between her junior and senior years of her bachelor’s program and working for IBM, she had begun to explore a future in computer science. She would soon complete her masters and her PhD in information science with the University of Chicago and, in 1973, she launched a career that would change the way we interface with computers.

While working for Xerox PARC she coordinated with Alan Kay and, together, they developed SmallTalk-80, a programming language that used a GUI (graphics user interface) instead of command-based systems. Her GUIs featured a number of things we’d recognize today, including icons, menus, pointers and overlapping windows. The system was categorically easier to use.

In 1979 Adele refused to give Steve Jobs (and a team of engineers) a demonstration of SmallTalk. She believed it would “give away the kitchen sink.”  Her superiors at Xerox would order that she comply; Apple would later use many of the ideas for the Macintosh desktop. The GUI system is one we all use everyday, from our laptops to our mobile devices.

Adele was the president of the Association for Computer Machinery from 1984 to 1986. In 1987 received the ACM Software Systems Award with Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and, in the same year, was among Forbes’ “Twenty Who Matter.” In 1990 she was presented her a Lifetime Achievement Award by PC Magazine. The Association for Computing Machinery inducted her as a Fellow in 1994. She was inducted into the Women in Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame in 2010.

Ingrid Daubechies (1954 – present)

Ingrid Daubechies is a Belgian physicist and mathematician best known for her innovative work on Wavelets, which revolutionized the field of signal processing, and, among other things, are used to compress images, remove background noise, fill in missing parts of pictures based on nearby information, and they are most notably critical to image compression and digital cinema technology.

Ingrid is one of the world’s most cited mathematicians, and despite her study being grounded in maths and physics, Ingrid has published over 150 papers, spread across a wide range of fields, from art restoration, evolutionary biology, electrical engineering and image and data processing. The correlation between all these subjects, is that they have all benefited from the application of Ingrid’s wavelets.
Ingrid has developed methods to extract and compare information from bones and teeth, now widely used by biologists in morphology studies. She has also applied her mathematical expertise to art authentication and restoration, pairing her love of maths with her passion for art.

Ingrid is also passionate about making mathematics more accessible to all. While she was the (first female) president of the IMU she supervised the creation of the IMU Committee for Women in Mathematics, which helps women in developing countries organize workshops and meetings. She has also made a donation to an IMU fund for graduate students in developing countries, for each of the many monetary award she had received for her work.

Mary Lou Jepsen (1965 – present)

Mary Lou Jespen is a technical executive and inventor, whose work focuses on display, imaging, and computer hardware. She has also been the founder of numerous successful startup businesses.

Inspired by the Star Wars films in her youth Mary became interesting in figuring out how sci-fi technology could be applied in real life. Some of her notable inventions in the fields of display include; the life sized hologram of buildings from Cologne in Germany, the creation of Google Lego TV, and also proving that it is possible – though culturally inappropriate – to project images on to the moon.

Her businesses include One Laptop per Child (which mass produces $100 laptops) and Pixel Qi (which designs and manufactures new displays). Most recently she founded OpenWaters in 2016, using optics to develop cutting edge techniques and devices for creating 3D images of the inside of the human body and so improve healthcare.

Mary was placed in the top 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, and a CNN top 10 thinker and Forbes top 50 women in technology in 2018. As an inventor Mary has published over 200 patents with more sure to come.

Kimberly Bryant (1967 – present)

Kimberly Bryant is an electrical engineer, who her early career on high-voltage electronics, and then later moving on to work for to biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. However her greatest impact on the fields in STEM lays in the work she is doing to encourage and support the future generations to pursue their own careers in STEM.

In 2011 Kimberly founded a non-profit organisation called Black Girls Code, with the purpose of ‘changing the face of technology’ by encouraging girls of color to engage with technology and computer science, with a focus on how to apply these skills in an entrepreneurial manner. During her own time studying engineering Kimberly had experienced isolation, being in classes of mostly boys and rarely studying alongside any other black girls. This issue resurfaced when her daughter wanted to learn computer programming, but they could not find any courses in the area well-suited to her.

Kimberly’ organisation creates an environment where young girls, particularly those from minority groups, can continue to cultivate an interest in STEM subjects, and be encouraged to pursue this into a career. In 2011 African-American women made up less than 3% of the technology workforce. Kimberly is determined to see this number grow. The San Francisco-based nonprofit organisation has a goal of teaching one million black girls to code by 2040.

Kimberly has been awarded the prestigious Jefferson Award for Community, features on the Business Insider’s list of “The 25 Most Influential African-Americans in Technology”, the Root 100 and the Ebony Power 100 lists, and was named one of FastCompany’s Most Creative People.

Laura Demarco (1974-present)

Laura DeMarco is a professor of mathematics, whose research in the field of dynamical systems, which is the study of how mathematical spaces evolve over time. She is also a champion of getting young women interested in mathematics and serves as a role model for those working to get into the field.

Even though she is the youngest woman on our list, Laura had trouble finding role models as she progressed through her education. For what feels like relatively recent history in relation to other influential women on this list, Laura did not have a woman professor until the last semester of her undergraduate program. For someone who always loved maths and was looking for some encouragement, it was a TA of one of her classes that prompted her to consider graduate school. It was a world devoid of role models for women.

Which is why Laura is such a proponent of women role models in STEM, and mathematics in particular. She is an organizer of the GROW (Graduate Research Opportunities for Women) conference, using her notoriety as a prominent woman in the world of mathematics to the advantage and advancement of women in the discipline, and ensuring that her students have the confidence that they need to continue to climb in the field they love as much as Laura.

And there’s no doubt that she loves mathematics and is considered among the best mathematicians in her area of research. Laura gave an invited address at the Joint Maths Meeting in 2013. In the same year, was elected as a Fellow in the inaugural class for the American Mathematical Society and set up the Complex Dynamics and Arithmetic Geometry Conference with the National Science Foundation. In 2017, the American Mathematical Society presented her with the Satter Prize for her contributions to complex dynamics, potential theory and arithmetic dynamics. She was in Rio de Janeiro in 2018 for the International Congress of Mathematicians, where she was an invited speaker. In 2019 she presented the Myhill Lecture Series.