The Greatest
Science
Books of 2016
.
14.WOMEN IN SCIENCE
or 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.
BRAIN PICKINGS
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