Born: May 12, 1820, Florence, ItalyDied: August 13, 1910, London, England Florence Nightingale was a British nurse, hospital reformer and humanitarian.Born in Florence, Italy, on May 12, 1820, Nightingale was raised mostly in Derbyshire, England, and received a thorough classical education from her father. In 1849, she went abroad to study the European hospital system, […]

Born: August 1, 1818, Nantucket, Massachusetts, U.S.Died: June 28, 1889, Lynn, Mass. Maria Mitchell was an American astronomer, born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, and privately educated. Her father maintained a small observatory, where she began her studies in astronomy. In October 1847, she discovered a telescopic comet, an accomplishment that brought her international recognition. The following

Born: Nov 7, 1878, ViennaDied: Oct 27, 1968, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England Lise Meitner was an Austrian-Swedish physicist, who first identified nuclear fission. She was born in Vienna, Austria, and educated at the Universities of Vienna and Berlin. In association with German physical chemist Otto Hahn, she helped discover the element protactinium in 1918, and she

Born: December 16, 1901, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.Died: November 15, 1978, New York Margaret Mead was an American anthropologist, widely known for her studies of primitive societies and her contributions to social anthropology.Mead was born in Philadelphia on December 16, 1901, and was educated at Barnard College and at Columbia University. In 1926, she became assistant

Born: June 16, 1902, Hartford, Conn., U.S.Died: Sept 2, 1992, Huntington, New York Barbara Mcclintock was an American geneticist and Nobel laureate, most noted for her discovery that genes can transfer their positions on chromosomes, which is important for the understanding of hereditary processes. She obtained her doctorate in botany from Cornell University in 1927

Born: June 28, 1906, Kattowitz, Germany[now Katowice, Poland]Died: Feb 20, 1972, San Diego, California, U.S. Maria Goeppert-Mayer was a German-American physicist and Nobel laureate, best known for her study of nuclear structure. Goeppert-Mayer was born in Poland and educated at the University of Göttingen. In 1931, she married the American physicist Joseph E. Mayer and

Born: December 10, 1815, Piccadilly Terrace, Middlesex[now in London], EnglandDied: November 29, 1852, Marylebone, London Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, was a British mathematician. Byron laid some of the early conceptual and technical groundwork for high technology by helping develop an early computer.The daughter of English poet Lord Byron, Ada Byron was born in

Born: April 22, 1909, Turin, Italy Rita Levi-Montalcini is an Italian biologist, born in Turin and educated at the University of Turin Medical School. She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with American biochemist Stanley Cohen for their contributions to the understanding of growth factors (see Growth Factor) in human development. Levi-Montalcini

Born: July 4, 1868, Lancaster, Mass., U.S.Died: Dec 12, 1921, Cambridge, Mass. Henrietta Swan Leavitt was an American astronomer, whose work made possible the first accurate determination of extragalactic distances. While working at the Harvard College Observatory on a survey of Cepheid variable stars (stars the luminosity, or brightness, of which varies in an extremely

Born: Feb 6, 1913, London, EngandDied: Dec 9, 1996, Nairobi, Kenya Mary Douglas Nicol Leakey was a British paleoanthropologist. The daughter of a landscape painter, Leakey was born in England but travelled abroad during much of her childhood. She became committed to anthropology at the age of 11 when she visited the rockshelter of Cro-Magnon

Born: July 9, 1926, Como, Italy Krim is an American medical researcher and health educator, known for her determined work in combating AIDS and HIV through research and education.Krim was educated at the University of Geneva (B.S., 1948; Ph.D., 1953). She worked on biomedical research projects at the Weizmann Institute of Science at Rehovot, Israel

Born: January 15, 1850, Moscow, RussiaDied: February 10, 1891, Stockholm, Sweden Kovalevskaya was a Mathematician and writer who made a valuable contribution to the theory of partial differential equations. She was the first woman in modern Europe to gain a doctorate in mathematics, the first to join the editorial board of a scientific journal, and

Born: January 5, 1906, London, EnglandDied: August 24, 1978, Wrexham, Clwyd[now in Wrexham], Wales Kenyon was a English archaeologist who excavated Jericho to its Stone Age foundation and showed it to be the oldest known continuously occupied human settlement.After working with the British archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson at the Zimbabwe ruins in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe),

Born: March 19, 1900, Paris, FranceDied: Aug 14, 1958, ArcouestBorn: Sept 12, 1897, ParisDied: March 17, 1956, Paris French physical chemists, husband and wife, who were jointly awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their discovery of new radioactive isotopes prepared artificially. They were the son-in-law and daughter of Nobel Prize winners Pierre and

Born: December 9, 1906, New York, U.S.Died: January 1, 1992, Arlington, Virginia Grace Murray Hopper was an American navy officer, mathematician and pioneer in data processing, born in New York City and educated at Vassar College and at Yale University. An associate professor of mathematics at Vassar (1931-44), Hopper joined the navy in 1943. She