Ada Lovelace is largely credited with having written the first computer algorithm. She is also recognized as being the first to understand how a mechanical calculator could actually be used for computing, how it “might act upon other things besides number.” Born from the union between poet Lord Byron and mathematician Anne Isabella Milbanke in […]
Selma Burke (1900-1995) is credited with being the artist behind US President Franklin Roosevelt’s image on the American ten-cent coin. One of the most notable sculptors of the 20th century, she was also a painter and art teacher. Burke first started sculpting small objects and animals with white clay from a riverbed near her home […]
Irène Joliot-Curie was a radiologist, activist and politician as well as the daughter of two of the world’s most famous scientists: Marie and Pierre Curie. Along with her husband, Frédéric, she discovered the first-ever artificially created radioactive atoms, paving the way for innumerable medical advances, especially in the fight against cancer. “Without the love of […]
Martha Graham was an artistic force of the 20th century. Some have equated her talent to the genius of her contemporaries Picasso, James Joyce, Stravinsky, and Frank Lloyd Wright. According to the Martha Graham website, she created 181 ballets and an innovative dance technique that “has been compared to ballet in its scope and magnitude”, […]
MacKenzie Scott is one of the richest women in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. Scott married Jeff Bezos in 1993, helped him build Amazon, and co-found the company in 1994. The couple divorced in 2019. In September 2020, she was considered the world’s richest woman when her net worth was about $62 […]
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an early British feminist, writer and controversial thinker who promoted educational and social equality for women. A radical proposition at the time, a main argument she defended in her writings was that girls and boys should be educated together and that women and men should share parental responsibilities. Her life was […]
Made up of sections of DNA, genes control the life processes of organisms, according to Nobelprize.org In 2012, American biochemist Jennifer Doudna along with French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier developed “a methodology for high precision changes to genes. They used the immune defenses of bacteria, which disable viruses by cutting their DNA up with a type […]
In Tuscumbia, Alabama in 1880, a baby girl was born who would make a difference to millions. Her name was Helen Keller and she was no ordinary child; at 19 months old, she contracted a disease (possibly rubella or scarlet fever) that caused her to lose her sight and hearing. As a consequence, she also […]
It would be difficult to find an art aficionado who is not familiar with the influential Italian painter Caravaggio (1571-1610). Another talented individual, though, who is considered the one and only “Caravaggista” – the artist whose work stands out as equal in emotion, action and fervor to that of the renowned painter – was all […]
A leading foreign policy voice in the United States, Czech-born Madeleine Albright (1937-2022) was the first woman to serve as US secretary of state, remaining in that position from 1997 to 2001. Secretary of state is the most senior position in the American president’s cabinet and is fourth in the presidential line of succession, after […]
