Happy Ada Lovelace Day

palladias

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, when STEM enthusiasts highlight the work of modern and historical women scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. If you run a blog, you may want to participate by posting about a woman in a STEM field whom you admire. But I'd love to have people share women scientists/mathematicians/authors in the comments that they think we could all stand to read more about.

Women in STEM fields (living or dead, fiction or nonfictional) that you'd like us to know more about (preferably with a little precis and a link
Books about women in STEM fields that are awesome
Books written by women about STEM subjects that are awesome
Studies about sexism (or ways to combat it) in STEM fields (and anywhere else)
Practical things you or organizations you're with have done to cut down on careless or intentional sexism. (how did you implement it, how did you measure the effects, etc)

Women in STEM fields (living or dead, fiction or nonfictional) that you'd like us to know more about (preferably with a little precis and a link
Books about women in STEM fields that are awesome
Books written by women about STEM subjects that are awesome
Studies about sexism (or ways to combat it) in STEM fields (and anywhere else)
Practical things you or organizations you're with have done to cut down on careless or intentional sexism. (how did you implement it, how did you measure the effects, etc)

Your prior should be that a mascot is fictitious until proven otherwise. That a mascot is a mascot is reason to believe that official history has been improved.

In 1906, when Pierre Curie died, his death was reported as follows in the French newspaper Le Matin

"M. Pierre CURIE, le savant qui découvrit le radium, a été écrasé dans la rue et tué net par un camion"

Translation "Mr. Pierre Curie, the scientist who discovered radium, was crushed in the street and killed by a truck"

As for Grace Hopper, she gets credited with the first compiler: But a compiler compiles a language. The great majority of references to the language her compiler supposedly compiled are mascot references rather than language references, and are hugely outweighed by language references to Fortran. Therefore, no such language, no such compiler.

Grace Hopper's actual contribution to computing was that she designed the Cobol language, the second high level computer language. She seems to have originally been made a mascot for developing Cobol, which she quite genuinely did, and then, when people responded by saying unkind things about Cobol, got credited with the first compiler instead, an improvement typical of mascot history..

If Cobol was less loathed, Grace Hopper would be a reasonable mascot as the creator of the second high level language. Since Cobol stinks, Lovelace, the second computer programmer, is the better mascot.

You dismiss the history as innacurate because information has been tampered with in a biased fashion, and yet the only evidence you point to is from a newspaper obituary, a forum of information traditionally uninformed and biased. My priors for "mascots" being fictitious are outweighed by my priors for conspiracy theories being fictitious. You say you know modern history's opinion has been changed, which implies that there exists at least some piece of convincing evidence that they did NOT manage to change, which you have read. Show it please.

16asr14y

Marie shared the 1903 Nobel prize in chemistry with her husband and Bequerel. Seems like relevant authorities at the time thought she had a substantial role. Why should we believe you rather than the Nobel Committee? It's not like 1903 was a big year for establishment scientists looking for female mascots... I'm not well versed on the early history of programming languages, and don't want to opine based on glancing at Wikipedia. But Hopper appears to have been involved in a bunch of pre-Fortran work on higher-level languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System -- so this isn't simply about COBOL.

8pragmatist14y

Marie Curie was regarded as an accomplished scientist by her contemporaries, and it is implausible that this high regard is explicable in terms of political correctness, given the time period. It might still be true that she was the least important member of the team that discovered radium, but the mere fact that a newspaper in 1906 described Pierre Curie as the discoverer of radium is not very good evidence for this. Even if we grant that Pierre was primarily responsible for the discovery of radium, Marie should still be credited with the isolation of radium. She accomplished this four years after Pierre's death, and it is one of the accomplishments for which she received her second Nobel.