Showed that most of the universe is something we cannot see, and was told the result was impossible
Refused a place at Princeton because it took no women in astronomy, she spent her nights measuring how galaxies spin, and found that the stars at the…
Used a lamp, a mirror and a round table to work out why the moon goes dark
An eighteenth-century Chinese astronomer and mathematician who, denied any formal scientific education, built simple home experiments to explain…
Abandoned while pregnant and working as a maid, she went on to classify ten thousand stars
A Dundee schoolteacher who ended up cleaning the house of the director of the Harvard Observatory. He hired her to do sums, and she built the first…
Stopped a plague that was killing everyone it touched, by insisting that doctors wear masks
A Penang-born doctor sent to Manchuria in the winter of 1910 to face an epidemic with a near-total death rate. He worked out it spread through the…
Started botany at 51 after two bad marriages and a breakdown, and collected 150,000 plants in thirteen years
She had no scientific training, no degree and no institution behind her. She travelled by canoe and mule through Mexico and the Amazon, alone for…
Saw people starve in the famine and spent the next sixty years making rice yield more
A rural agricultural teacher whose experimental plants were smashed during the Cultural Revolution. He rescued a few from a well, kept going, and…
