MEET THESE

GREAT WOMEN

WHO HAVE

 WON

 SCIENTIFIC

NOBELS

THROUGHOUT HISTORY

US scientist Frances Arnold became the fifth woman to win a chemistry Nobel on Wednesday, the day after Canada's Donna Strickland became just the third woman -- and first in 55 years  to clinch the physics award. Twelve women have won the medicine Nobel, meaning there have been 19 female winners. Here we bring you these icons.

We shall present them according to their areas of winning.

PHYSICS

 Marie Curie, née Sklodowska-

1903

 A towering figure in the history of chemistry and physics,        Marie Curie is most famous for the discovery of the elements polonium and radium. Prohibited from higher education in hernative Poland (then controlled by Russia), she moved to Paris in 1891 and studied at the Sorbonne. In 1895 Marie married Pierre Curie (who was by then a noted scientist), and together they began working on radiation experiments with uranium. (It was Marie who first coined the term “radioactivity” to describe the emission of uranic rays.) In 1898 the Curies discovered polonium and radium, and in 1903 they shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Henri Becquerel. When Pierre was killed suddenly in 1906, Marie took over his post as a professor at the Sorbonne, becoming the first woman to teach there. She was awarded a second Nobel in 1911 (this time for chemistry) for her work on radium and its compounds. Concerned more with humanitarian causes than financial rewards, Marie Curie was one of the most celebrated scientists of her time, at a time when the field was almost exclusively for men. It is thought her long exposure to radioactive materials precipitated her death. Marie Curie was the first person to win a second Nobel Prize… She had two daughters, one of whom, Iréne, went on to win the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1935… The element curium, discovered in 1944, is named after the Curie family.

MARIA GOEPPERT-MAYER  (1963)

Maria Goeppert Mayer was born on June 28, 1906, in Kattowitz, Upper Silesia, then Germany, the only child of Friedrich Goeppert and his wife Maria, nee Wolff. On her father’s side, she is the seventh straight generation of university professors.

In 1910 her father went as Professor of Pediatrics to Göttingen where she spent most of her life until marriage. She went to private and public schools in Göttingen and had the great fortune to have very good teachers. It somehow was never discussed, but taken for granted by her parents as well as by herself that she would go to the University. 

Yet, at that time it was not trivially easy for a woman to do so. In Göttingen there was only a privately endowed school which prepared girls for the “abitur”, the entrance examination for the university. This school closed its doors during the inflation, but the teachers continued to give instructions to the pupils. Maria Goeppert finally took the abitur examination in Hannover, in 1924, being examined by teachers she had never seen in her life. In the spring of 1924 she enrolled at the University at Göttingen, with the intention of becoming a mathematician. But soon she found herself more attracted to physics. This was the time when quantum mechanics was young and exciting. Except for one term which she spent in Cambridge, England, where her greatest profit was to learn English, her entire university career took place in Göttingen. She is deeply indebted to Max Born, for his kind guidance of her scientific education. She took her doctorate in 1930 in theoretical physics. There were three Nobel Prize winners on the doctoral committee, Born, Franck and Windaus.

Shortly before she had met Joseph Edward Mayer, an American Rockefeller fellow working with James Franck. In 1930 she went with him to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. This was the time of the depression, and no university would think of employing the wife of a professor. But she kept working, just for the fun of doing physics.
Karl F. Herzfeld took an interest in her work, and under his influence and that of her husband, she slowly developed into a chemical physicist. She wrote various papers with Herzfeld and with her husband, and she started to work on the color of organic molecules.
In 1939 they went to Columbia. Dr. Goeppert Mayer taught at Sarah Lawrence College between 1941 and 1945, but she worked mainly at the S. A. M. Laboratory, on the separation of isotopes of uranium, with Harold Urey as director. Urey usually assigned her not to the main line of research of the laboratory, but to side issues, for instance, to the investigation of the possibility of separating isotopes by photochemical reactions. This was nice, clean physics although it did not help in the separation of isotopes.
In 1946 they went to Chicago. This was the first place where she was not considered a nuisance, but greeted with open arms. She was suddenly a Professor in the Physics Department and in the Institute for Nuclear Studies. She was also employed by the Argonne National Laboratory with very little knowledge of Nuclear Physics! It took her some time to find her way in this, for her, new field. But in the atmosphere of Chicago, it was rather easy to learn nuclear physics. She owes a great deal to very many discussions with Edward Teller, and in particular with Enrico Fermi, who was always patient and helpful.
In 1948 she started to work on the magic numbers, but it took her another year to find their explanation, and several years to work out most of the consequences. The fact that Haxel, Jensen and Suess, whom she had never met, gave the same explanation at the same time helped to convince her that it was right. She met Jensen in 1950. A few years later the competitors from both sides of the Atlantic decided to write a book together.
In 1960 they came to La Jolla where Maria Goeppert Mayer is a professor of physics. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Heidelberg. She has received honorary degrees of Doctor of Science from Russel Sage College, Mount Holyoke College and Smith College.
They have two children, both born in Baltimore, Maria Ann Wentzel, now in Ann Arbor, and a son, Peter Conrad, a graduate student of economics in Berkeley. Maria Goeppert Mayer died on February 20, 1972.
 

DONNA STRICKLAND (2018)

Early life and education

Strickland was born on 27 May 1959 in Guelph, Ontario, Canada to Edith J. (née Ranney) and Lloyd Strickland. She has a sister Anne and a brother Rob.

Strickland graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering degree in engineering physics from McMaster University in 1981. At McMaster, she was one of three women in a class of 25.

Strickland obtained her Ph.D. degree in physics (specializing in optics) at the University of Rochester in 1989. Her doctoral thesis, supervised by Gérard Mourou, was titled "Development of an ultra-bright laser and an application to multi-photon ionization". In 1985, while at Rochester, Mourou and Strickland co-invented chirped pulse amplification for lasers, a method of generating ultra short optical pulses of high intensity, for which they later received the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Career

From 1988 to 1991, Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council of Canada, where she worked with Paul Corkum in the Ultrafast Phenomena Section, which had the distinction at that time of having produced the most powerful short-pulse laser in the world.^[7] She worked in the laser division of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1991 to 1992 and joined the technical staff of Princeton's Advanced Technology Center for Photonics and Opto-electronic Materials in 1992. She joined the University of Waterloo in 1997 as an assistant professor. Strickland is currently an associate professor, leading an ultrafast laser group that develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations. She describes herself as a "laser jock".

Strickland's recent work has focused on pushing the boundaries of ultrafast optical science to new wavelength ranges such as the mid-infrared and the ultraviolet, using techniques such as two-colour or multi-frequency techniques, as well as Raman generation.  She is also working on the role of high-power lasers in the microcrystalline lens of the human eye, during the process of micromachining of the eye lens to cure presbyopia.

Strickland became a fellow of The Optical Society (then known as Optical Society of America) in 2008. She served as its vice president and president respectively in 2011 and 2013 and was a topical editor of its journal Optics Letters from 2004 to 2010.

Nobel Prize in physics

On 2 October 2018, Strickland was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for her work on chirped pulse amplification with her doctoral adviser Gérard Mourou.

Strickland and Mourou published their pioneering work "Compression of amplified chirped optical pulses" in 1985 while Strickland was still a doctoral student under Mourou. Their invention of chirped pulse amplification for lasers led to the development of the field of high-intensity ultrashort pulses of light beams. Because the ultrabrief and ultrasharp light beams are capable of making extremely precise cuts, the technique is used in laser micromachining, laser surgery, medicine, fundamental science studies, and other applications. It has enabled doctors to perform millions of corrective laser eye surgeries.^[10] Strickland said that after developing the technique they knew it would be a game-changer.^[6] Arthur Ashkin, a retired American physicist who worked at the Bell Labs, received the other half of the prize for his invention of "optical tweezers that grab particles, atoms, viruses, and other living cells with their laser beam fingers".

Strickland is the first female Nobel Physics laureate in 55 years and the third woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, after Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963.

 

In the subsequent episode, we shall bring to you great women in Chemistry and Medicine. Just continue to log on to this site.