On the International Day of Women in Science, we present to you stories of five exceptional women who, with their indomitable spirit and grit, fought against the norms of male dominance in scientific pursuit and became beacons of inspiration for future generations to come.

PART-1

• Katherine Johnson, the mathematician who worked on calculations of orbital mechanics at NASA in the 60s- Anuprita Kulkarni

“I like to learn. That is an art and a science.”

Katherine Johnson, a NASA mathematician, was a key figure in missions during the Space Race. She had a fascination with numbers right from her childhood. Back then, technology had not developed enough for fast and accurate mathematical calculations - which is why NASA used human computers, a majority of which were women.

Working as a “computer” in the West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ Langley laboratory, Johnson analyzed data from flight tests and investigated a plane crash caused by wake turbulence.

In 1961, she did trajectory analysis for America’s first human spaceflight – Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7. As NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn in the following year, Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for. As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the IBM computers, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine. The astronauts were wary of putting their lives in the care of the electronic calculating machines, which were prone to hiccups and blackouts. “If she says they’re good,’' Katherine Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space.

Her contributions to space exploration further include the calculations that helped sync Project Apollo’s Lunar Module with the lunar-orbiting Command and Service Module and the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS, later renamed Landsat). She has authored or co-authored 26 research reports.

At age 97, Johnson added another extraordinary achievement to her long list: President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour.

• Anna Mani, the first woman meteorologist - Vedant Bhutra

Anna Mani was ever inquisitive. Her eight-year-old self demanded the Encyclopaedia Britannica instead of customary diamond earrings for her birthday. At that age, she had already read all the books in Malayalam at her public library and, by twelve, all the books in English! Her family believed that girls should study only till they got married, which led her to decide not to marry at all, if she must stop learning.

After graduating with an honours degree in Physics, she joined the Indian Institute of Science under C.V. Raman. Despite writing five research papers and completing her Ph.D. thesis within three years, she was not granted a doctorate, likely because she was a woman. Anna decided not to let this bring her down and applied for a scholarship in London. However, there were none available for physics — only one for meteorology. Thus, with a simple twist of fate, Anna went on to become a meteorologist!

When she came back, she joined the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) in Pune. She wanted to make India self-sufficient in collecting data and developing its own instruments instead of importing them. She standardised the drawings of a hundred different weather instruments. In a short while, she was heading a team of 121 scientists, all men.

Her team developed an apparatus that accurately measured the ozone levels in the atmosphere long before the rest of the world realised the dangers of the depleting ozone layer. She also wanted to develop India's renewable energy sources—she identified locations, set up equipment, and measured wind speeds in more than 700 places in India, making India the fourth-largest producer of wind power! In 1963, Vikram Sarabhai approached her for help in setting up the rocket launching site at Thumba. After working at IMD for 30 years and becoming the deputy director, she retired in 1976 and wrote two books. These books have since become essential reference texts for students and researchers alike. Anna Mani received the K.R. Ramanathan Memorial Medal as well as a citation from the International Ozone Commission.

Her work was not only for the benefit of India but also the world. According to Oliver Ashford of the World Meteorological Organisation, "She had such expertise over a wide range of measuring devices. If only we had an Annamaniometer!"

• Latika Nath, the ‘Tiger Princess’ of India -Sampurna Roychoudhury

Latika Nath is a wildlife biologist with a D.Phil in Tiger Conservation and Management. She grew up in contact with many wildlife conservationists (her father was a member of the Indian Board of Wildlife). She’s not only the first Indian woman but also the first Indian to work on tiger conservation and management in India and has been doing so for 25 years.

She’d received 5 scholarships for higher studies, including the Chevening Award, and has worked with organizations like IUCN, UNDP, UNFPA, and ICIMOD. Nath has worked on many other species, including the Asian Elephant, the Gangetic Dolphin, the Arna, high-altitude mammals in the Kanchenjunga area, etc.

She had admitted that "It was a daunting prospect to break into primarily a male bastion, and work in the field shoulder to shoulder with men.” and has had to do much to prove herself, the hardest being belying her physical appearance. When she had begun working, she was almost always a lone woman working in remote areas with no access to civilization. The risks, clearly, are irrefutable, but since then, many other women have been able to follow the road she paved.

She is also a wildlife photographer and writer and claims that working closely with and understanding the wildlife gives a new element to the pictures she takes. Nath has contributed to many TV programs and documentaries with BBC, Discovery, National Geographic, and more and earned the title ‘The Tiger Princess’ in National Geographic’s documentary on her life and work. She now also works closely with tribal communities in India to resolve human-wildlife conflicts.

Nath says she wants to show that she ‘[is] not a socialite adopting a cause but a serious conservation ecologist who can prove her right to be counted in the ranks of India’s foremost conservationists, and have what it takes to do real work on the ground.’

PART-2

• B Vijayalakshmi-Manav Shah

B. Vijayalakshmi, or as she was gracefully called, Viji, joined the Department of Theoretical Physics at Madras University, in 1974 after obtaining her Masters from Seethalakshmi Ramaswami College, Tiruchirapalli, for her Ph.D. Coming from a conservative background, she had overcome gender restrictions to pursue her dream of research. Yet, as fate would have it, she was diagnosed with stomach cancer while pursuing her Ph.D., but the life-threatening disease was not enough to overshadow braveheart Viji's academic ambitions.

She aimed to make substantial research contributions and be recognized as a physicist, with the immediate goal being finishing her degree before anything happened to her. Her academic work involved studies of relativistic equations of higher spin in external electromagnetic and gravitational fields. She focused on searching for suitable ways to construct interacting higher spin theories. She also helped characterize a spinning particle in non-relativistic quantum mechanics, which also produced an interesting dual relation between massless particles and the monopoles of electromagnetic theory. This specific contribution laid the foundation for many exciting developments in the field.

Viji actively participated in politics, and T. Jayaram, her husband, played a very influential role in shaping her political involvement. Being an active member of the Associations of Research Scholars of the Madras University, she also helped solve many problems faced by graduate students.

Viji died of cancer on May 12, 1985, just three years after finishing her Ph.D. The scientific community mourned the loss of a gem, a truly inspiring figure whose passion for science and determination shall never be forgotten.

• Ada Augustus Lovelace- Countess of Lovelace, mathematician, and writer considered to be the first computer programmer -Vatsala Nema

Ada Byron was born in 1815, in Regency period London, to Lord Byron, a famous poet, and Annabella Milbanke, an heiress committed to progressive causes. At 12, she was enthusiastically studying what she called “flyology” and imagining how to mimic bird flight with steam-powered machines.

Ada met Charles Babbage through a party meant for “socializing,” who then invited her to see the Difference Engine - a 2-foot-high hand-cranked contraption with 2000 brass parts. This ignited her interest in mathematics. Babbage’s idea of the Difference Engine was of a machine that could compute any polynomial up to a certain degree using the method of differences and then automatically step through values and print the results, taking human errors entirely out of the loop.

Soon after Queen Victoria ascended the throne, she became the countess of Lovelace and began pursuing Mathematics seriously, albeit in secret (presumably in fear of society gossip) under Augustus De Morgan’s tutelage.

She contributed to the development of the Difference Engine, beginning with publishing a paper that included her extensive notes. There’s a lot of modern content in Ada’s notes: she explained nested loops (then cycles), even giving a mathematical notation for them, and also gave a concise and robust algorithm for computing Bernoulli’s Numbers, a feat she is still known for.

She talks about how far the Analytical Engine can go in computing what was previously not computable with any accuracy while citing the example of the celestial three-body problem and describes it as:

“The material and mechanical representative of analysis, and that our actual working powers in this department of human study will be enabled more effectually than heretofore to keep pace with our theoretical knowledge of its principles and laws, through the complete control which the engine gives us over the executive manipulation of algebraic and numerical symbols.”

Babbage constructed both the engines, but Ada understood what the Analytical Engine should be capable of and would ask Babbage questions about how it could be achieved. She first saw herself as an interpreter; in doing so, she developed a more abstract understanding of it than Babbage had—and got a glimpse of the compelling idea of universal computation.

She became what now would be called the CEO for Babbage’s undertakings but unfortunately not for long. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer and passed away 3 months later, in 1852, at the young age of 36.

Her contribution was such that Alan Turing, in his infamous 1950 Turing Test paper - coined the term “Lady Lovelace’s Objection” (“an AI can’t originate anything”). Michael Faraday referred to her as “the rising star of science.” As in the case of Ramanujan, we can only imagine how many more achievements she could have under her trunk had it not been for her untimely demise.