The Best Science Books of 2016
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14.
WOMEN IN SCIENCE
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For a lighter companion to the two books
above, one aimed at younger readers, artist and author Rachel Ignotofsky
offers Women
in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World — an illustrated encyclopedia of fifty influential
and inspiring women in STEM since long before we acronymized the conquest of
curiosity through discovery and invention, ranging from the ancient astronomer,
mathematician, and philosopher Hypatia in the fourth century to Iranian
mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, born in 1977.
True as it may be that being
an outsider is an advantage in science and life, modeling furnishes young hearts with the assurance that
people who are in some way like them can belong and shine in fields comprised
primarily of people drastically unlike them. It is this ethos that Igontofsky
embraces by being deliberate in ensuring that the scientists included come from
a vast variety of ethnic backgrounds, nationalities, orientations, and cultural
traditions.
There are the expected trailblazers who have
stood as beacons of possibility for decades, even centuries: Ada Lovelace, who
became the
world’s first de facto computer programmer;
Marie Curie, the first
woman to win a Nobel Prize and to this day the
only person awarded a Nobel in two different sciences; Jocelyn Bell Burnell,
who once elicited the exclamation “Miss
Bell, you have made the greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth
century!”(and was subsequently excluded from the Nobel
she deserved); Maria Sybilla Merian, the 17th-century German naturalist whose
studies of butterfly metamorphosis revolutionized
entomology and natural history illustration;
and
Jane Goodall — another pioneer who turned
her childhood dream into reality against tremendous
odds and went on to do more for the
understanding of nonhuman consciousness than any scientist before or since.
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