An encyclopedia editor asked Meitner to write an article about radioactivity. He had read a paper she wrote about the physical aspects of radioactivity. The letter that she got was addressed to “Herr Meitner” (Mr. Meitner). She explained that she was female and the offer was taken away. Meitner followed gender roles later in her career. British physicist Ernest Rutherford visited Berlin Laboratory. During this visit, Meitner spent the day shopping with Rutherford's wife. Meanwhile, the men talked about work. Meitner also had lots of accomplishments. After working with Hahn and investigating behavior of beta rays, she received an appointment in the radioactivity apartment and invited Meitner to join him. Soon after, Max Planck asked Meitner to be an assistant professor and lecture at the institute for theoretical physics. Meitner was the first woman in Germany to be in her position. Many news reporters were drawn to her opening lecture.
Chien-Shiung Wu
Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American nuclear physicist.
Wu was born in May 1912 in Liuhe, a small town near Shanghai. Wu Zhongyi, her father, participated in the 1911 revolution against the Chinese Manchu dynasty. He was the founder of an all girls’ school in China. Educating girls wasn’t seen as important at that time. Wu went to that school until she was nine. After that, she went to the Soochow Girls’ School. She graduated in 1930. She was the best student in her class.
Wu went to college at Nanjing University. She studied physics there. She graduated in 1934. She spent one year teaching in a university. A year later, she went to study X-ray crystallography, which is the study of crystals. She did so at the National Academy of Sciences in Shanghai. A woman scientist who she worked with told her to go to study in the United States. She said this because China didn’t have a very good physics program. With the help of her rich uncle, she sailed to America in 1936.
Wu started working on nuclear physics with a particle physicist named Ernest Livermore. She helped Emilio Segre. He won a Nobel Prize years later. During the same time, Japan invaded China. She didn’t hear from her family for years. She kept working.
Wu also studied the electromagnetic energy a particle gives off when it slows down. She also studied what happens when a uranium nucleus splits. For her work, she got a PhD in 1940. She became known as an expert on fission, which is the splitting of atoms.
She studied theories about atoms developed by Enrico Fermi. She ended up confirming one of his theories.
Wu continued with her work in physics in her later career. She faced a difficult hypothesis involving beta decay in 1963. Beta Decay was discovered by Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann.
Chien-Shiung Wu helped overthrow the law of conservation of parity along with Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Wing Yang. For 30 years, parity was a universal law. The theory states that parity was when an event and its reflection were the same. Scientist believed that the conservation of parity applied to all events. Chien-Shiung Wu helped to disprove this theory. She found this when studying the electrons at a low temperature. Wu did most of the work. The Nobel Prize committee did not acknowledge her. They did recognize her two male partners who won the award.
Many considered Wu's work on Fermi’s theory worthy of a Nobel prize. Her work was important but did not qualify for the prize. The two scientist she worked with on the theory about parity won a prize and she did not. People believed her work was not original.
She became the first woman to be the president of the American Physical Society. She was the first woman to receive the Comstock Award from the National Academy of Sciences. She was also the first woman to receive the Research Corporation Award. She received honorary degrees from over a dozen universities. Yale, Princeton and Harvard were some of the universities that recognized her work. Princeton gave her an honorary doctorate of science. She became the first woman to ever receive that.
Wu married Luke Yuan in 1942. She taught at Smith College in Massachusetts. After that, she taught at Princeton. In 1944, she was recruited to do top-secret work on radiation detectors for the atomic bomb project called the Manhattan Project at Columbia University. She worked in a secret facility.
After World War II, Wu heard back from her family. They had all survived.
Wu retired in 1981. She died of a stroke on February 16, 1997, in New York. She was 86 years old. Her ashes were buried in the courtyard of her father's school.
Wu was an inspiration and a trailblazer. She didn’t let racism or sexism put her down. She kept working hard. She made some amazing discoveries. Her work wasn’t credited with a Nobel Prize but she made a huge impact on the world's knowledge of fission and quantum physics.
Vera Rubin
Vera Cooper Rubin (July 23, 1928 December 25, 2016) was an American astronomer. She discovered dark matter
Rubin was born on July 23, 1928. Her parents were Rose Applebaum and Phillip Cooper.  At age 10, Rubin became fascinated by the stars in her home, Washington, D.C. At age 14, she built her first telescope.
Rubin attended Vassar College where she earned her B.A. in 1948. She earned her M.A. at Cornell University in 1951. She received her Ph.D. in astronomy at Georgetown University. At Cornell her thesis studied evidence of bulk rotation in the universe.
Rubin taught at Georgetown before becoming a researcher at the Carnegie Institution of Science. She spent a year as a teacher in math and physics at Montgomery County Junior College. She contributed to newspapers. She was an associated editor of the Astronomical Journal and the editorial board of Science Magazine. Rubin was on the astronomical committee at Harvard University and at the National Academy of Sciences.
Rubin was an American astronomer who discovered dark matter. Dark matter is a material in the universe that does not reflect light. She and W. Kent Ford found that the stars closest to the center of the galaxy and the stars farthest from the center of the galaxy moved at the same rate.  Their findings said that mass astronomers could see only 10 percent of the galaxy's total mass. This makes dark matter invisible. Rubin joined the council of American Women in Science in 1984 to promote women in astronomy.
Rubin was given honorary degrees from Creighton University, Harvard University, and Yale University. She won the National Medal of Sciences in 1993.
Rubin was married to Robert Rubin, a physicist. She wrote a children's book on astronomy to encourage young girls to study science. Rubin had four children named David, Allan, Judith, and Carl. Her children all became scientists.
Rubin died in Princeton on December 25, 2016.
Hypatia
Hypatia (hy-PAY-shee-uh) of Alexandria was a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher. She lived around 370 - 415 C.E. Hypatia was the first noted women in mathematics, philosophy, and astronomy. She lead a philosophical movement called Neoplatonism. Neoplatonism was developed from the ideas of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato.
Hypatia was born in Alexandria, a city in Egypt. During Hypatia’s time, Egypt was a great place for learning. Her dad was also a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, so she had it in her blood line. Her father was Theon. Hypatia and her father worked on commentaries of Ptolemy’s work together. Ptolemy was a Greek astronomer who was from Alexandria. Hypatia's name was also put on work done by other mathematicians.
The Museum of Alexandria was a more like a university and library than a museum. It played a big role in education, and Hypatia’s life. Theon may have been the director of the museum at one point. Theon was interested in mathematics. This may have led Hypatia to pursue astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy.