The Mount Rushmore of Forgotten Women of Science

History has a long memory but sometimes her memory isn’t perfect. Women are not the only ones who are forgotten and done wrong by the passage of time, but this short blog is dedicated to the four most forgotten women in the history of science.

I am not big on talking about “injustice” mainly because the injustice of Good Friday is ubiquitous and on display in the life of every human being. However, I am also a scientist, and my secular field is dominated by the accomplishments of men. This short blog is dedicated to four women who made major contributions to the field and have been largely forgotten. Once again, not my usual area of interest, but just this once. The forgotten women of science. 

Before we get to our four faces on the mountain, consider the pool of candidates. The list below represents some of the most consequential scientific minds of the last thousand years — women whose work changed the world but whose names most people could not tell you:

Lise Meitner, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Emmy Noether, Eunice Newton Foote, Rosalind Franklin, Alice Ball, Katherine Johnson, Chien-Shiung Wu, Nettie Stevens, Hedy Lamarr, Ida Noddack, Sophie Germain, Hertha Ayrton, Gerty Cori, Williamina Fleming, Mary Cartwright, Irène Joliot-Curie, Trotula of Salerno, Mary Kenneth Keller, Émilie du Châtelet, Maryam Mirzakhani. 

Twenty-one names. Twenty-one women who should be more famous than they are, but we don’t live in a just world, and once again, women of science aren’t the only ones who get forgotten. Most people could identify maybe three of them. Some would struggle with one.

From this extraordinary pool, we are choosing four — the Mount Rushmore of Forgotten Women of Science. The criteria are ruthless and simple: the magnitude of the scientific contribution must be enormous, and the degree of erasure must be nearly total. Being forgotten is a requirement.

Here is the countdown.

#4 — Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900–1979)

She told us what the stars are made of. 

If you had to pick one question that defines astronomy, it might be this: what are stars actually made of? For most of human history, the assumption was that they were composed of roughly the same stuff as Earth — iron, nickel, rock, familiar minerals forged under unimaginable heat.

Cecilia Payne proved that was spectacularly wrong.

In her 1925 doctoral thesis, working at the Harvard Observatory, she analyzed the spectra of stars and concluded that they are made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. Today, every schoolchild who has ever heard of a star learns this fact. It is foundational to everything we know about the cosmos. At the time, it was considered so outrageous that her supervisor, the prominent astronomer Henry Norris Russell, pressured her to include a line in the published thesis calling her own conclusion “almost certainly not real.” She complied. He later arrived at the same conclusion through his own analysis and received widespread credit for the discovery. For years, textbooks listed it as his finding.

What makes Payne-Gaposchkin’s case compelling beyond the science is the human dimension. She didn’t blow up. She didn’t fight. She wrote the disavowal, buried the conclusion, and kept working. That is not weakness — that is the only available move for a woman in a field in 1925 that was not fully prepared to hear her voice. 

She was eventually recognized, appointed the first female full professor at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1956 — by which point she had spent thirty years being underrecognized, and, at the most critical moment, forced to doubt herself in public. The universe she helped explain is comprised mostly of hydrogen, and she was the first one to notice.

#3 — Lise Meitner (1878–1968)

She helped split the atom.

Most people who have heard of nuclear fission know one name: Otto Hahn. Here is what they do not know: Lise Meitner was his partner for thirty years, co-discovered the element protactinium with him, and worked alongside him on the experiments that led directly to the discovery of fission. When the Nobel Committee awarded the 1944 Prize in Chemistry to Hahn alone, it was one of the most consequential oversights in the history of science.

But Meitner’s erasure was not a single event. It happened in layers. In 1923, she discovered what we now call the Auger effect — the phenomenon by which atoms release energy when electrons rearrange themselves. Two years later, French physicist Pierre Victor Auger independently discovered the same effect and published. His name is on it. Hers is not. One woman, two major discoveries, zero Nobel Prizes.

Einstein called her “the German Marie Curie.” The Nobel committee nominated her for the prize forty-eight times over her lifetime without awarding it. She was Jewish and fled Nazi Germany in 1938, abandoning her career and her lab. When the Nobel was announced for fission in 1944, Hahn — who had, to his credit, written letters defending her when she was forced to flee — accepted it alone. 

She lived to 89 and never publicly expressed bitterness. Element 109 is named Meitnerium in her honor. That is a remarkable tribute — a fitting substitute for the recognition she was owed while she was alive.

#2 — Eunice Newton Foote (1819–1888)

She discovered what we now call climate change in 1856. 

In 1856 — a decade before the American Civil War ended, a full century before the phrase “climate change” entered common usage — an amateur scientist from Connecticut named Eunice Newton Foote conducted a series of experiments in her home laboratory. She placed glass cylinders filled with different gases into direct sunlight and measured how each one heated up. The cylinder filled with carbon dioxide heated far more than the others and was dramatically slower to cool.

Her conclusion was written in plain language that reads as startling today as it should have been then: “An atmosphere of that gas would give earth a high temperature.”

She had just described the greenhouse effect. She was the first person in history to demonstrate it experimentally and to draw the correct conclusion from it. Her paper was published in the American Journal of Science. Three years later, Irish physicist John Tyndall conducted more sophisticated experiments, reached the same conclusion, and became known to history as the father of climate science. 

Whether Tyndall knew of her work is still debated by historians. What is not debated is this: her name vanished from the record entirely and did not resurface until 2011, when a retired geologist named Ray Sorenson happened across her paper in a dusty journal. One hundred and fifty-five years later.

Whatever you happen to think about climate change, if it’s real, a result of human behavior, or whatever you think, she is the first person to accurately describe, in precise and elegant terms, this effect that is now being debated. The phenomena of trapping heat with carbon dioxide was predicted by a woman whose name we forgot for a century and a half. 

#1 — Emmy Noether (1882–1935)

She changed the face of physics and mathematics. She happens to be the greatest female mathematician in history. Period. 

There is a case to be made that Emmy Noether is the most important scientist most people have never heard of. 

Albert Einstein called her the most significant creative mathematical genius of her era. The physicists Leon Lederman and Christopher Hill — one of them a Nobel laureate — compared Noether’s theorem to the Pythagorean theorem in terms of its importance to human understanding. Theoretical physicist Ruth Gregory has said the theorem is “pervasive in everything we do.” Every time a physicist invokes a conservation law — conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, conservation of angular momentum — they are using a result that flows directly from Noether’s theorem, whether they know it or not.

Here is the theorem in plain language: wherever there is a symmetry in nature, there is a corresponding conservation law. That connection — between symmetry and the fundamental rules the universe obeys — is the skeleton on which all of modern physics is built. Quantum mechanics, general relativity, particle physics, string theory: all of it rests on Noether’s insight.

She was not merely ahead of her time. She reshaped the time she was in.

And yet she spent years teaching university courses that were formally listed under a male colleague’s name, because the faculty would not permit a woman to teach. She worked without pay for over a decade. She fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and landed at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, a visiting position well beneath her stature. She died at 53 from complications of surgery, before the full implications of her work were widely understood. Einstein’s tribute appeared in the New York Times and contained language that, read today, lands with the weight of an apology from the universe itself.

What places Noether at the top of this list is not only the magnitude of the contribution, but the particular shape of the forgetting. Her theorem is abstract — it lives in the language of mathematics, not in a double helix you can photograph or a mission to the moon you can watch on television. There is no tidy story, no dramatic moment when the discovery clicked. That abstraction has cost her enormously in public recognition, even as it has made her indispensable to every physicist alive. Her ideas, as she once wrote to a colleague, “have crept in everywhere anonymously.” She understood, even then, that the world would use her work without knowing her name.

She was right. It has.

The Summary

Four women. Four stories with the same shape: an enormous contribution and a long silence, where recognition, or at least some measure of credit, should have been given.

Emmy Noether gave physics its grammar. Eunice Newton Foote discovered how gas can trap heat. Lise Meitner split the atom. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin told us what stars are made of.

From the larger pool, the honorable mentions are not trivial. Rosalind Franklin produced the X-ray image that cracked the structure of DNA and died four years before Watson, Crick, and Wilkins collected the Nobel — a prize that cannot be awarded posthumously. Alice Ball, a 23-year-old chemist, developed the first effective treatment for leprosy. Ida Noddack proposed nuclear fission in print in 1934 — years before the “official” discovery — and was laughed out of serious scientific consideration. Chances are an awful lot of our scientific future is in the hands of people whose names we haven’t learned yet but are even now toiling away to make the next set of great discoveries.