Everyone has heard of Ada Lovelace, though the actual facts of her life have become a little buried in steampunk tributes. But she is far from the only early female mathematician and scientist of note. The Museum of the History of Science have been highlighting Lovelace, her contemporaries, her forerunners and also more recent female scientists of note. Their exhibition covers a wide range of disciplines.
Caroline Herschel and Jocelyn Bell Burnell both feature, two stargazers born 200 years apart. Bell Burnell discovered the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star, in 1967. Herschel (though less well known than her brother William) discovered a number of comets and nebulae, and in 1798 published a list of corrections to John Flamsteed's star catalogue. Having been dead for 70 years at that stage we don't know how dignified Flamsteed would have been at being corrected by a woman.
We're very good at underestimating people in the past, perhaps because it makes us feel we've come further. That Anna Atkins should have been illustrating a book with photographs in the mid 1800s (it was a book on algae illutsrated with her own cyanotype photograms) is an astonishing advance in both science and publishing. And yet we've largely forgotten her name. To rediscover her work and that of other pioneers head down to the museum before the end of the year.
