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Herschel, Caroline
1750-1848
English Astronomer




Herschel's brother, Sir Frederick William, pioneered in the study of galaxies and also discovered the planet Uranus.

Caroline worked on the complicated mathematics for her brothger's observations. In 1928 the Royal Astronomical Society awarded her its gold medal for discovering eight comets and arranging a catalogue of 2,500 nebulae and star clusters.

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Grace Hopper
1906-92
American Commodore and Scientist



Grace Hopper attended Yale and New York Universities during World War II when she joined the Naval Reserve. She was commissioned a Lieutenant and ordered to the Bureau of Ordinance Computation Project at Harvard, where she learned to program computers.

She later worked as a mathemati-
cian in Philadelphia, and helped program the first commercial large-scale electronic computer. Her navy career resumed in 1967 after she had been inactive since the war.

She was appointed in 1983 as Commodore; the title of that grade changed to Rear Admiral in1985. Many colleges and universities have conferred honorary degrees on Admiral Hopper, and she was the recipient of the first Computer Sciences 'Man of the Year' award presented by the Data Processing Management Association.

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Sofya Kovalevskaya
1850-91
Russian Mathematician




Mathematician and novelist who studied in Germany.

Sofya Kovalevskaya wrote a remarkable thesis on partial differential equations. In 1884 she became professor of higher mathematics at the University of Stockholm.

Four years later she was awarded the Prix Borodin for a paper on the rotation of a solid body around a fixed point. Her work was so extra-ordinary that the value of the prize was doubled.

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Mary Leakey
1913-96
English Anthropologist




Married to Louis Leakey whose fossil discoveries in East Africa proved that man was far older than had previously been believed and that human evolution was centered in Africa.

In 1959 in the Olduvai Gorge of Tanzania Mary Leaky uncovered a fossil hominid that was named Zinjanthropus boisei, which is now recognized as Australopithecus, an extinct side branch of the genus Homo. Later she found another hominid - Homo habilis - providing evidence of coexisting hominid groups one or two million years ago in East Africa.

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Margaret Mead
1901-78
American Anthropologist





Margaret Mead became known for her studies of nonliterate peoples in Samoa and New Guinea, and also of contemporary complex societies.

Her field work in Samoa provided material for her first book. She was mainly interested in childhood and adolescence, and the cultural conditioning of sexual behaviour.

Later, some of her conclusions had to be revised and critics challenged her methodolgy.

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