My Fanciful Accounts

1. First and always will my girl top this list. With her new degree in Aerospace Engineering (with honors, I am so proud), I look forward to seeing how far she will go and all the wonderful things that she will accomplish. And that she will, I have no doubt.

2. Marie Curie-Sklodowska, a physicist and a chemist, was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize.

3. Dr. Maria Zakrzewska broke the barriers that hindered women in practicing medicine in the USA. She founded hospitals for women and children in New York and Boston. She also pioneered the movement that opened the nursing profession to Black women. The first Black woman graduated from Zakrzewska's school in 1879.

4. Caroline Herschel, the first woman member of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Irish Academy, Caroline was presented with gold medals by the kings of Denmark and Germany. She was the first women in history to discover a comet. Caroline's first solo discovery made her famous. In her lifetime she would find 7 more comets, and three new Nebula. In 1789 Caroline Herschel published an updated version of Flamsteed's Catalog of Stars. After her brother William's death (her brother got her started and they worked together) in 1822, she returned to Germany where she completed a catalog of 25 hundred nebulae.

5. Shirley Ann Jackson became the first black woman to obtain a PhD from MIT and the first in the nation to earn a doctorate in physics. Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson added yet another first to her resume when she became the first African American and the first woman to chair the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Dr. Jackson continues to make history today as the first African American woman to lead a national research university, RPI in Troy, New York. Her commitment to education may be her most enduring legacy.

6. Grace Murray Hopper, grandmother of COBOL, She conceptualized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first modern programming languages. She is credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for fixing computer glitches (motivated by an actual moth removed from the computer).

7. Rachel Carson, writer, scientist, and ecologist, challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and the government, and called for a change in the way humankind viewed the natural world.

8. Helen Greiner, 
mechanical engineer and roboticist, cofounder of iRobot, went to see Star Wars when she was 10. Greiner was captivated not by Hans Solo or Luke Skywalker but by the three-foot-tall spunky android, R2D2. "He was not just a machine," she told Dataquest. "He had moods, emotions, and dare I say, his own agenda. This was exciting to me—he was a creature, an artificial creature." When the ten-year-old found out that R2D2 was actually controlled by a man inside a plastic-cased costume she was crushed. From that day, Greiner vowed to create her own R2D2, a real one based on state-of-the-art technology.

9. Dr. Mae Jemison has a background in both engineering and medical research. She has worked in the areas of computer programming, printed wiring board materials, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, computer magnetic disc production, and reproductive biology. She became the first black woman to travel in space when she went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on September 12, 1992.

10. Mileva Maric Einstein, was the only woman in the class, and only the fifth in the history of Zurich's prestigious Swiss Polytechnic School. Some scholars believe Mileva did the math for the Theory of Relativity, others say she corrected Einstein's math, and still others claim she was even more deeply involved. The paper outlining the theory is signed with a hyphenated name Einstein-Marty, the Hungarian form of her maiden name Maric.