Getting Beyond Marie Curie

I admire Marie Curie as a great scientist and inventor but I get tired of hearing about her. Several times in meetings where attendees were asked to name great women in STEM, Marie Curie was the only one anyone could think of.  Marie Curie is extremely impressive: the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only woman to win in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple sciences.  On a wall at Cal Poly, the portrait of Marie Curie is next to that of Albert Einstein. But she did die almost eighty years ago and there have been many great women in science, math, and technology before and since.

One of my smaller motivations for helping to create the “CRA-W and Anita Borg Institute Wikipedia Project – Writing Wikipedia Pages for Notable Women in Computing” (and the list of notable women in computing with a current total of 234 names) is to get beyond Marie Curie.  Maybe next time I participate in an icebreaker exercise at a meeting, participants will shout out…

• Anita Borg
• Grete Hermann
• Admiral Grace Hopper
• Sister Mary Kenneth Keller
• The Countess of Lovelace – Augusta Ada King
• Hedy Lamarr
• The ENIAC Programmers

…or even the name of a still-living woman. But please not just Marie Curie.

Image Copyright 2009 by Katy Dickinson