I recently discovered a very interesting website, it is called the Quantum Universe. While browsing through the various articles I encountered a series of articles that triggered my interest. In these articles Sumedha Biswas writes about women in science, and mostly about women who made major contributions but were acknowledged much later about their work. Below I copied some stories from her articles I found very interesting and I had absolutely no idea about.
"In 1905, Nettie Stevens discovered the X and Y chromosomes – later called the sex chromosomes since they help in determining the sex of a fetus. [...] Despite Stevens making this groundbreaking discovery, her mentor and colleague E.B. Wilson received most of the credit for her work. Both were working on the same problem at the same time, but Wilson only concluded his work after he saw her results. He still believed that environmental factors played an important role for the determination of the sex of the fetus. [...]"
Nettie Stevens, Wikipedia Commons
I would also recommend S. Biswas's second article with the full story of Nettie Stevens.
In her third article S. Biswas tells the story of Hedy Lamarr, which was the artistic name of Hedwig Kiesler.
Hedy Lamarr, Wikipedia Commons
Born in 1914 in Vienna, Kiesler was initially fascinated by theater and took acting lessons. Naturally gifted, she landed a role in a play in no time. During WWII she left a glamorous life and career in the United States in order to work together with her friend and composer George Antheil on communication systems for the Allied Forces. The pair began working on a technology that is responsible for every wireless communication service today!
During the last decades, many resources have been invested in quantum computing. This research field has grown immensely and amazing results have been obtained. The plans for the future are highly ambitious, but at the same time, there are serious questions that need to be addressed.
Last Tuesday, the 8th of March, was the International Women's Day. On this occassion we would like to share some stories of women in science. We start with this video made bij IFL Science, which was published five years ago, but is still relevant. It shows some great women who changed the world.
Between 1973 and 1986 multiple rapes and murders were committed in the state of California. Years later the idea was raised that these crimes might be connected. But traditional DNA analysis from the samples found at the crime scenes, could not identify the culprit.
With ever-growing possibilities and interconnectivity on the internet, we rely more and more on it being secure. However, our classical internet is not provably secure, could a quantum internet solve our problems?
It is undeniable that natural, integer, rational and real numbers are necessary to explain what happens in our daily life, but in high school some of us also hear about some weird objects called imaginary numbers, also known as complex numbers. What do we need these numbers for?
