Discovered pulsars as a student and watched the Nobel Prize go to her supervisor
A girl who failed the eleven-plus went on to find a new kind of star by staring at miles of chart paper. When she was finally given a major prize…
Found the true shape of planetary orbits while defending his mother against a charge of witchcraft
A sickly child of a mercenary father, he spent years wrestling with the orbit of Mars until he gave up circles for ellipses. His three laws of motion…
Totally deaf by 20, he could not attend a lecture or use a telephone, and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
A Sydney boy whose hearing failed through his teens chose chemistry because it was a subject he could learn from books. His wife, also a chemist, was…
A labourer's son who traced cholera to a water pump when everyone blamed bad air
He walked from Newcastle to London to study medicine, gave the Queen chloroform, and mapped the deaths of Soho to prove cholera was in the water. The…
Spent a career convincing ordinary Mexicans that astronomy belonged to them too
A Mexican astronomer who researched interstellar gas and galaxy formation while building planetariums, museums and television programmes to bring…
Built India's first tissue culture laboratory and spent a career chasing the causes of cancer
A cell biologist who established India's first tissue culture research laboratory almost singlehandedly, then spent decades investigating the links…
Demoted, denied grants and nearly deported, she kept faith with the idea behind mRNA vaccines
A butcher's daughter from a house with no running water, she spent decades on a technology almost nobody would fund. Her work made the Covid vaccines…
The NASA mathematician whose calculations put Americans into orbit and on the Moon
A Black woman in segregated Virginia, she did the orbital mathematics for the first US spaceflights by hand, and John Glenn refused to fly until she…
Went to prison for her beliefs and became one of the first two women elected to the Royal Society
She worked out the shape of the benzene ring at her kitchen table while raising three children, spent a month in Holloway as a wartime pacifist, and…
Explained nuclear fission while in exile, then refused to help build the bomb
Banned from the main building of her own institute for being a woman, she became one of the leading physicists in Germany, fled the Nazis with ten…
Her paper on how complex cells arose was rejected fifteen times, and turned out to be right
A biologist who argued that the powerhouses inside every animal and plant cell were once free-living bacteria. Colleagues mocked the idea for a…
Watched the Bengal famine as a student and spent his life making sure India could feed itself
A plant geneticist who turned down a professorship in America to go home to a country living from ship to mouth, and within a decade had helped…
Worked unpaid for nearly thirty years, then won the Nobel Prize for explaining how the nucleus is built
Because her husband was on the faculty, universities would not employ her, so she did physics as a volunteer. The newspaper headline when she won the…
At 52 she sailed to South America to paint insects nobody in Europe had seen
When people still believed insects sprang from mud, she raised caterpillars and drew each stage of their lives. She left her husband, sold her…
Pioneer of radioactivity and the first person to win two Nobel Prizes
Barred from university in her home country, she studied in secret, moved to Paris with almost nothing and went on to discover two elements and win…
Banned from the research ships, she mapped the ocean floor from their soundings and found it splitting apart
Told her discovery of a rift running down the Atlantic was girl talk, she kept plotting until the evidence was undeniable. Her map changed what…
Warned that spray cans were destroying the ozone layer, and was told he was being hysterical
A chemist who turned a childhood bathroom into a laboratory, and as a young postdoc did the calculation that showed a harmless-seeming industrial gas…
A self-taught fossil hunter who changed how the world understood prehistoric life
Poor, female and working-class in Georgian England, she found the first complete ichthyosaur and plesiosaur skeletons and was quietly relied upon by…
Taught herself algebra from a fashion magazine and became the woman the word "scientist" was coined for
Her father feared study would damage her health and her first husband thought it pointless. Widowed at 27, she taught herself mathematics and became…
Doodled her way to the Fields Medal, the first woman to win it, and died at 40
A Tehran schoolgirl who was told she was no good at maths became one of the great geometers of her generation, working slowly on huge sheets of paper…
Solved a centuries-old packing problem in a dimension nobody could picture
A Ukrainian mathematician who solved the centuries-old problem of how to pack spheres most efficiently in eight and twenty-four dimensions, becoming…
A grocer's son from Bengal who worked out how to read the temperature of a star
Expelled from school for a political protest and kept out of a hostel because of his caste, he produced an equation at 27 that let astronomers turn…
A blacksmith's son with no schooling who read the books he was binding and discovered electromagnetism
Treated as a valet by the wife of the man who hired him, he became the greatest experimental scientist of his century, then refused a knighthood and…
From a Karachi classroom to the team that first heard two black holes collide
A physicist who spent decades on the painstaking engineering of an experiment most people thought would never work. In 2015 it detected gravitational…
