Alice Everett

Alice Everett was a mathematician and astronomer who studied the mathematical tripos at Girton College, worked at the Royal Observatory Greenwich and then at the Potsdam Astrophysical Observatory. She had a second career working on optics at the National Physical Laboratory. Her final career was working on the early developments of television broadcasting.

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Annie Scott Dill Maunder

Annie Scott Dill Maunder was a Northern Irish astronomer and mathematician who studied the mathematical tripos at Cambridge then worked at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. She was the first to find evidence of the movement of sunspot emergence from the poles toward the equator over the sun’s 11-year cycle.

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Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was a British mathematician and astronomer who did important work for her Ph.D. at Radcliffe College of Harvard University. She showed that stars were composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium but, although completely correct, it was rejected by astronomers at the time.

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Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Henrietta Leavitt was an American astronomer who discovered the relation between the luminosity and the period of Cepheid variables. This was a vital step in measuring the distance to remote galaxies.

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Hypatia

Hypatia of Alexandria (370-416), a mathematician and philosopher, one of the most eminent women teachers of antiquity, and one of the ablest of the later Greeks who preached the pagan philosophy.

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