In passing: Venetia Burney Phair

(In passing marks the memory of a person featured in IntLawGrrls)

Venetia Burney Phair died on April 30 at age 90 at home in Epsom, south of London, England. As we've posted, she made her mark 8 decades earlier, when as a schoolgirl she suggested that a newly discovered planet be named Pluto. As depicted in the 2008 short film, Naming Pluto (video of trailer below), 11-year-old mythology buff Venetia (left) made the suggestion to her grandfather, an Oxford librarian, who relayed the idea to an Oxford astronomer. The rest is history. Pluto's ignominious 2006 reclassification as a "dwarf planet" by no means dims her celestial achievement. As stated by London's Telegraph, she "had the distinction of being the only woman in the world to have named a planet."

On August 24, ...

... 1950, Edith Sampson (right), 49, became the 1st African-American delegate to the United Nations to hold the position, having been appointed an alternate delegate by President Harry S. Truman. This was among many 1sts in her career: she was the 1st woman to graduate from Chicago's Loyola University School of Law; the 1st African-American woman elected a judge in the United States; and the 1st African-American to be named a member at large of NATO.
... 2006, in a move that rendered longstanding notions of the solar system obsolete, the nongovernmental organization International Astronomical Union determined that Pluto is not a planet, as schoolchildren'd been told for decades. That celestial body -- named in 1930 on a suggestion from 11-year-old English schoolgirl Venetia Burney (above) -- is now classified as a "dwarf planet," along with other bits and pieces orbiting the sun.