On December 5

On this day in ...
... 1822 (190 years ago today), Elizabeth Cabot Cary was born into a family of "Boston Brahmins," as the Yankee elite of that Massachusetts capital were known. Home-schooled on account of ill health, eventually she fell in with an intellectual crowd in Cambridge, and in 1850 she married the Swiss-born Louis Agassiz, widowed scientist/natural historian 15 years her senior, who had recently arrived in the United States, with his 3 children, to take up a post at Harvard. Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz (left) accompanied her husband on a number of expeditions; her publications include A First Lesson in Natural History (1859). (photo credit) An educator, she was instrumental as early as 1879 in developing the women's school that in 1894 became Radcliffe College, part of Harvard. Radcliffe's honorary president from 1900 to 1903, she died in 1920. Her papers are available here.

(Prior December 5 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On December 2

Depiction of the 1942  nuclear experiment

On this day in ...
... 1942 (70 years ago today), in "a jury-rigged laboratory" on a squash court underneath the Stagg Field bleachers at the University of Chicago, occurred the 1st human-made, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. At the head of this experiment was Enrico Fermi, an Italy-born Nobel laureate in physics who'd fled his homeland a few years earlier, during the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. A coded message from Fermi to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt thus heralded the nuclear era:

'The Italian navigator has landed in the new world.'

Fermi's Manhattan Project breakthrough would advance U.S. efforts to construct an atomic bomb.

(Prior December 2 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On November 26

Dr. Ruth Patrick in the field

On this day in ...
... 1907 (105 years ago today), in Topeka, Kansas, Dr. Ruth Patrick was born into a family led by a banker-lawyer father whose training and passion were in the field of botany. The father and his young daughters frequently went on weekend nature expeditions. Patrick would be educated 1st in Kansas City, then in South Carolina, and ultimately in Virginia, earning her Ph.D. from UVA in 1934. She is known for her aquatic ecology research, centered on the algae group known as diatoms – through her research she made important discoveries respecting the history of areas such as the Virginia-North Carolina Great Dismal Swamp and the Utah Great Salt Lake. Patrick earned many awards, and was further honored by establishment of the Ruth Patrick Science Education Center in Aiken, South Carolina.

(Prior November 26 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On November 24

On this day in ...

(credit)

... 1859, in Britain, a scientific study called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published. It set forth a theory of evolution developed by its author, Charles Darwin. He drew on work of earlier scientists and on evidence he'd gathered during an 1830s voyage to sites such as the Galapagos Islands on the HMS Beagle. is published in England. The theory was controversial then and since. Indeed, as followers of the last U.S. election cycle well know, evolution continues to inspire debate – in this 'Grrl's own congressional district, Darwin garnered 4,000 write-in votes following a widely viewed anti-evolution speech by the incumbent member of Congress, who ran otherwise unopposed in November. (Big Bird got a few write-in nods, too.)

(Prior November 24 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On October 25

On this day in ...
... 1978, a Spanish galleon was found off the coast of Labrador by Dr. Selma Barkham and researchers from the Public Archives of Canada. The ship had been sunk in 1525. Barkham (right) was the 1st historian to document the presence of Basque maritime explorers in that part of Canada. (photo credit) She is a member of the Order of Canada and won many other awards in recognition of her work.

(Prior October 25 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On October 20

On this day in ...
... 1942 (70 years ago today), Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (left) was born in Magdeburg, Germany. After trying studies in various sciences at the University of Frankfurt, she shifted to the University of Tübingen, where she embarked on a career that would lead to her receipt, along with 2 male researchers, of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, "for their discoveries concerning 'the genetic control of early embryonic development.'" Her own account of her life, written for the Nobel event, is here. Nüsslein-Volhard is among only 10 women so honored; only one has received an unshared prize in the field. Data to ponder this year, when no women won in any category.

(Prior October 20 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On February 10

On this day in ...
... 1850, Sofia Kovalevskaya (also known as Sonia Kovalevsky) died in Stockholm, Sweden, 41 years after she'd been born in Moscow, Russia, to a military father and a scholarly mother. She learned mathematics via tutors; when it became time for higher education, as a teenager married a man who would give her the then-requisite permission to study, and they emigrated. She audited classes in Heidelberg and debated "woman's capacity for abstract thought" in London. She presented papers in to the faculty at the University of Göttingen, for which she became the 1st woman in Europe to hold a doctorate in math. In Sweden (where she went by the first name of "Sonya"), the couple fell on hard times, and the husband committed suicide. Eventually she secured academic appointments at Stockholm University, and in 1889 she became the 1st woman appointed to a full professorship in Europe. (credit for photo of 1895 bust of Kovalevskaya)

(Prior February 10 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On April 13

On this day in ...
... 1941 (70 years ago today), Annie Jump Cannon died, 77 years after she'd been born in Delaware. Her father was a shipbuilder and legislator; her mother who loved to look at the stars and taught her daughter to do the same. Following graduation from Wellesley College, Cannon devoted herself to travel photography, but then began studying astronomy. In 1896 the Harvard College Observatory hired her and other women to catalogue stars; she "became one of the foremost American astronomers" and a co-developer of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which was the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures. She received a permanent appointment at the Harvard Observatory a few years before her death. (credit for photo of Cannon at her Observatory office)

(Prior April 13 posts are here, here, here, and here.)