Biography

Ada Lovelace was born in England in 1815, when women had limited access to advanced mathematical education.

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in the United States in the early 1820s.

Marie Curie was born in Poland in 1867, when women there had few opportunities to attend university.

In the 1300s, the empire of Mali in West Africa was ruled by a king named Mansa Musa.

Orville and Wilbur Wright were two brothers in the United States who ran a shop that built and repaired bicycles.

Wangari Maathai grew up in rural Kenya and later studied biology in the United States.

Katsushika Hokusai was born in Japan in 1760.

In the early 1800s, Cherokee people spoke a language that did not yet have a widely used writing system.

Rachel Carson trained as a marine biologist and joined the US Bureau of Fisheries in 1935.

Hedy Lamarr became famous as a film actress in the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1325, the young scholar Ibn Battuta left Tangier, in Morocco, on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Zora Neale Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, a self-governing Black town where stories, songs and conversation were part of daily life.

From 1799 to 1804, Alexander von Humboldt travelled through Spanish America with Aimé Bonpland, a French botanist and physician.

Fanny Mendelssohn, later Fanny Hensel, studied music alongside her younger brother Felix.

In 2007, John Maloof bought photographic negatives at a Chicago auction while researching a neighbourhood.

Mary Anning was born in 1799 in Lyme Regis, a small town on the south coast of England.

Wilson Bentley lived on a farm in Vermont, in the United States.

In 1948, Marie Tharp took a job at a laboratory in New York that studied the ocean floor.

In the late 1860s, many machine-made paper bags were shaped like envelopes.

In 1941, a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral came home from hunting with his trousers covered in burrs, the prickly seed cases of the burdock plant.

George Washington Carver taught agriculture at Tuskegee Institute.

Botanist Edavalath Kakkat Janaki Ammal studied plants at a time when few Indian women held senior scientific roles.

As a student in Karnal, India, Kalpana Chawla watched aircraft and became interested in how machines move through air.

Katherine Johnson joined the organization that became NASA as a mathematician.

In a search for treatments against malaria, Chinese pharmaceutical researcher Tu Youyou and her team examined both modern screening results and historical medical writings.

Alma Thomas taught art in Washington, D.C., schools for many years.

Granville T.

In 1948, writer James Baldwin left the United States for Paris.

Physician and researcher Charles Drew studied how blood could be collected, processed, and stored for transfusion.

Lise Meitner built a career in physics when women faced formal and informal barriers in European universities.

Garrett Morgan was born in Kentucky in 1877.

Jane Addams was born in Illinois in 1860 and grew up wondering how a useful life might serve other people.

Maria Sibylla Merian learned about insects by keeping them close enough to watch.

Louis Braille was born in France in 1809.

Leonardo da Vinci is often pictured as a solitary genius, but his education began in a busy Florentine workshop.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt studied star photographs at the Harvard College Observatory in the early 1900s.

Alice Kober approached an unread script without assuming which language it recorded.

Mary Engle Pennington treated refrigeration as a continuous journey rather than a single cold room.

Bartolomeo Cristofori cared for keyboard instruments at the Medici court in Florence near the end of the seventeenth century.

When construction of the Brooklyn Bridge began in 1870, Emily Warren Roebling did not hold an engineering title.

Gladys West grew up on a farm in Virginia.

As a child in California, Ellen Ochoa studied classical flute.

In 1921, Indian physicist Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman sailed across the Mediterranean Sea.

Chien-Shiung Wu was born in China in 1912.

Edmonia Lewis was the first widely recognized sculptor of African American and Native American heritage.

Junko Tabei loved mountains, though some people said climbing was not for women.

Lillian Moller Gilbreth studied how people moved while doing work.

Srinivasa Ramanujan filled notebooks with formulas in India, often recording results without the detailed proofs expected in university mathematics.

Augusta Savage shaped clay as a child in Florida, despite a father who first opposed her art.

The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom brought over 200,000 people to Washington.