Émilie du Châtelet and Mary Somerville were remarkable scientific pioneers, and they were two of my personal heroines when I was entering the field of mathematical science at a time when women were still relatively few and far between. The lives and scientific work of Du Châtelet and Somerville are the subjects of my book Seduced by Logic. I’ve also published short pieces at the following links (but please note that in a few places, the Cosmos magazine online links will show extraneous, repetitive lines of text that are not part of the narrative – rather, they were highlighted graphics in the printed version.) You can see these here, here, and here. (And if you have access, you can see here my review-essay on the scholarly anthology Émilie du Châtelet: Between Leibniz and Newton.)

Another extraordinary female pioneer is Emmy Noether, who showed the relationship between physical conservation laws and mathematical invariance. I illustrated this idea with a simple example in my review essay (on Yvette Kosmann-Schwarzsbach’s book The Noether Theorems), which you can read here.

Then there’s Marie Curie, of course, and in my review of Eva Hemmungs Wirtén’s Making Marie Curie, I touch on issues of gender, power, celebrity and money, as you can see here.