 |
|
Hypatia of Alexandria (AD 370 – 415)
Hypatia of Alexandria is the earliest woman scientist whose life is well documented. Hypatia became a lecturer and writer in the fields of mathematics, philosophy, astronomy and mechanics. Her main interest, practical technology, led to her invention of the pane astrolabe, an instrument used to measure the positions of the sun and stars and to calculate the ascendant sign of the zodiac. She is better remembered for her invention of the hydroscope - the first laboratory instrument to measure the specific gravity of liquids. |
| |
 |
|
Marie Curie (1867-1934)
With the encouragement of her Polish parents, Marie Curie distinguished herself in physics and mathematics at the Sorbonne, on a scholarship that was so meagre, she could barely afford to eat. She went on to win two Nobel prizes. The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marie and her husband in 1903 for work done on radioactivity and for the discovery of radium and polonium. After her husband’s death, she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911 for her work on isolating radium and her studies on its chemical properties. |
| |
 |
|
Hedy Lamarr (1914 - 2000)
Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, in Vienna in 1914) and is better known for her controversial acting career than she is as an inventor. She is reputed to have said “Any girl can be glamorous - all she has to do is stand still and look stupid.” And thus she hid her brilliant, inventive mind beneath her photogenic exterior! In 1942, at the height of her Hollywood career, she patented a frequency-switching system for torpedo guidance that was two decades ahead of its time. Only once the patent had expired, was sufficient technology in place to make the system usable and the idea was then used in cellular phone technology. In 1997 she was honoured with an award at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference for “blazing new trails on the electronic frontier.” |
| |
 |
|
Nomakwezi Mzilikazi
Nomakwezi was raised in the dusty, rural village of Idutywa, in the Eastern Cape. Despite the absence of a school laboratory, but motivated by her biology teacher, she completed her studies and is now regarded as Africa’s first black evolutionary physiologist and an expert on the behaviour of small animals such as the elephant shrew and bush babies. |
| |
 |
|
Himladevi Soodyall
Himladevi is Director of the MRC/NHLS/Wits Human Genomic Diversity and Disease Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research has shown that living Khoisan populations have retained some of the ancestral DNA signatures found in modern humans, making southern Africa the most likely geographic region for the origin of our species. Her contribution to the understanding of the origin of humans through the use of genetics is acknowledged both locally and internationally. |
|
