Today, by my (likely inaccurate) count, I created my 1000th Wikipedia article on women in mathematics, statistics, computer science, and other areas of science and technology. This is something I’ve been doing since 2008, with several goals in mind. Of course, I want to improve Wikipedia’s coverage in an area that has historically not been covered well. But I also want to counter the perception that there have only been a few heroic figures in this area (say, Hypatia, Lady Lovelace, and Emmy Noether) and show that, instead, it is becoming commonplace (although not yet frequent enough) for men and women to work as equals in science and technology. I want it to be the case that, when readers go to Wikipedia to see who did what in these areas, the names that they see include a representative sample of women, and that those readers can go to articles on those women to find out more about what they went through to do what they did.

The 1000th article (by my count) is Catherine Meadows, a cryptographer at the Naval Research Laboratory. As highlights from the earlier articles, the women listed below (in roughly chronological order of birth) all made the front page of Wikipedia in its “Did you know?” section.

  • Pandrosion of Alexandria (circa 4th century AD) contributed to mathematics before Hypatia.

  • Kate Claghorn (1864–1938) got her job in the New York Tenement House Department by passing a test that was intended to keep women out but actually eliminated all her male competitors.

  • Pia Nalli (1886–1964), an Italian mathematician, is the namesake of a street in Rome.

  • Aryness Joy Wickens (1901–1991) became the highest-paid women in the Federal Civil Service.

  • Marie-Louise Dubreil-Jacotin (1905–1972) was the first female full professor of mathematics in France.

  • Irene Barnes Taeuber (1906–1974) helped to establish the science of demography.

  • Margaret Jarman Hagood (1907–1963) wrote about the Mothers of the South and “helped steer sociology away from the armchair and toward the calculator”.

  • Márta Svéd (1909/10–2005), a Hungarian mathematician, earned her Ph.D. at age 75.

  • C. Doris Hellman (1910–1973), through her work on the history of astronomy, demonstrated the central importance of the Great Comet of 1577 to the success of the Copernican Revolution.

  • Marie Nyswander (1919–1986) popularized the use of methadone to treat heroin addiction but was killed by her own addiction to cigarettes.

  • Barbara Everitt Bryant (born 1926) was the first woman to direct the US Census Bureau.

  • Magdalena Mouján (1926–2005), a Basque mathematician, also wrote science fiction. One of her stories, about a time-traveling family, was censored by the Franco regime.

  • Marian Pour-El (1928–2009) proved a result on the undecidability of the wave equation that Freeman Dyson used as evidence for the superiority of analog to digital forms of life.

  • Anne Penfold Street (1932–2016), one of Australia’s leading mathematicians, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry before switching to mathematics.

  • Danièle Guinot (born 1933), a biologist who studies crabs, is the namesake of more than 30 genera and species, including a species of soldier crabs that have been used to perform biological simulations of billiard-ball computers.

  • Barbara A. Bailar (born 1935) resigned from the United States Census Bureau in 1988 to protest a decision not to adjust the 1990 results for systematic undercounting of minorities

  • Jeanne LaDuke (born 1938) worked alongside Natalie Wood as a child actor before becoming a professional mathematician.

  • Marjorie Senechal (born 1939) has written books on quasicrystals, Albania, and silk.

  • Martha E. Sloan (born 1939) became the first female president of the IEEE in 1993.

  • Martha Farnsworth Riche (born 1939) earned a doctorate in French literature before becoming director of the US Census Bureau

  • Linda Preiss Rothschild (born 1945) was kept out of both the best local high school in Philadelphia and graduate study at Princeton because neither accepted women. Instead she had to settle for MIT, and went on to a distinguished career in mathematics.

  • Graciela Chichilnisky (born 1946) proposed the carbon credit trading system in the Kyoto Protocol.

  • Joan L. Mitchell (1947–2015) co-invented the JPEG format for digital images.

  • Marjorie Hahn (born 1948) is a retired mathematics professor and international senior-level tennis player who approaches tennis games with the same plan that she uses for mathematical proofs.

  • Katherine Heinrich (born 1954), a mathematician from Australia, became the first female president of the Canadian Mathematical Society.

  • Ami Radunskaya spent ten years as a cellist and music composer between high school and college, before becoming a professional mathematician and president of the AWM.

  • Lixia Zhang helped found the Internet Engineering Task Force, designed the Resource Reservation Protocol, coined the term “middlebox”, and pioneered the development of named data networking.

  • Chieko Asakawa (born 1958) lost her sight as a teenager in a swimming accident, but later won the Women of Vision Award for her contributions to accessible computing.

  • Xifeng Wu, a Chinese cancer researcher recently hounded out of the US for collaborating with other Chinese researchers, showed that fifteen minutes of moderate exercise per day can increase lifespan by an average of three years.

  • Gigliola Staffilani (born 1966) is part of a superhero team of researchers in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations, the I-team, that also includes Fields Medalist Terry Tao.

  • Victoria Kaspi (born 1967) was one of the first to observe the cosmic recycling of pulsars.

  • Annalisa Crannell, an expert in the mathematics of water waves, chaos theory, and geometric perspective, brings chopsticks to art galleries as a tool for finding vanishing points.

  • Hinke Osinga (born 1969) has constructed visualizations of the Lorenz manifold using both crochet and stainless steel, and was the first female mathematician elected to the Royal Society of New Zealand.

  • Zvezdelina Stankova (born 1969) brought ideas from her Bulgarian mathematical education to California by founding the Berkeley Math Circle

  • Chawne Kimber (born 1971) is known both for incorporating concepts of social justice into her mathematics classes, and for her politically activist quilting, inspired by racist graffiti and George Carlin’s seven dirty words.

  • Hilary Swarts is a wildlife biologist who works with ocelots and once survived having a gorilla sit on her head.

  • Amy H. Herring led a study whose data showed that many American women were reportedly virgins at the birth of their first child.

  • Anette Hosoi designed a robot snail that moved by rippling over artificial snail slime.

  • Ioana Dumitriu (born 1976) was the first female Putnam Fellow.

  • Moon Duchin was inspired to break gender barriers in mathematics by a book on baseball player Jackie Robinson’s struggles against racism.

  • Evelyn Wang (born 1978) can extract water from desert air using a device like a Star Wars moisture vaporator.

  • Emily Riehl, bassist for the band Unstraight, wrote about “unstraightening” in her research as a professional mathematician.

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