It is well known that the United States produced the first nuclear bomb in 1945. However, less well known are the women who contributed their talents to make this event a reality. Physicist Leona Woods Marshall Libby was one of the women who helped to create the atomic weapon. She worked on the team that constructed the first nuclear chain reaction leading to the development of the bomb.
Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu earned many nicknames throughout her trailblazing years as a physicist, including “the First Lady of Physics,” the “Chinese Marie Curie,” and “Madame Wu.” Most known for her work on the top-secret Manhattan Project during World War II and her Cobalt-60 experiment that contested the law of conservation of parity (which holds that the mirror images of two physical interactions are the same), Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu’s pioneering work is regarded as a standard among physicists today.
Amalie Emmy Noether was a German mathematician who made many significant contributions to abstract algebra, despite facing anti-Semitism and being unable to get fair wages.
Alejandra Melfo is a Venezuelan physicist, known for her efforts studying and conserving glaciers, especially the Humboldt Corona, the last glacier in Venezuela.
Austrian physicist who jointly discovered “disintegration stars”
Dr. Marietta Blau was an Austrian physicist who did pioneering work with the pion, a subatomic particle that is made up of quarks and antiquarks. Even though Dr. Erwin Schrodinger nominated Blau and her colleague Dr. Hertha Wambacher, for the Nobel Prize, the committee instead, awarded the prize to Dr. Cecil Powell for work that utilized Dr. Blau’s discoveries.