Marie Curie Day
blog.jgc.org
blog.jgc.org
1. Her work eventually killed her. There was no way for the Curies to know what effect long-term radiation exposure would have, but it's still not a huge image booster for her to have died from material handling practices that would be considered idiotic today.
2. She wasn't a "lone wolf". i.e. She did much of her work with her husband Pierre, who shared the Nobel Prize for physics with her. Pierre was an instructor when they met and undoubtedly gave her a huge helping hand right when she needed it. Never mind that she came from a poor background and showed remarkable determination just getting into college in the first place, or that she would later be the sole recipient of a Nobel prize for chemistry!
3. People are still scared of words like "radioactive" and "radiation". Just look at how comfortable people are with coal power that kills thousands every year as a part of normal operation. Then note how those same people freak out when a nuclear plant threatens to give a handful of people cancer, but only after being horribly mismanaged and then hit by an improbable sequence of natural disasters! Arguably, Curie is scary by her association with something people are unreasonably paranoid about.
4. Let's face it, Ada Lovelace was a bit of a looker, or at least she was painted that way. She even had a sexy sounding name. We have real, unromantic photographs of Curie on the other hand the reveal her to be rather plain by comparison, plus her name is now linked with a scary unit of radioactive decay! It's a case of the Belle vs the school-marm.
Ada Lovelace is celebrated among us the computer geeks, because she's the female icon for the field.
I also posit that, were it not for the "rockstar" image that computing has acquired in the last 30 years or so, this Ada Lovelace thing wouldn't have catapulted like this as well.
Bottom line, Marie Curie is a great role model, and while I don't think that my daughter is headed for a career in science or engineering, at least she now sees that there are women who did it, and did amazing things in the field.
And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper way, way more awesome than Ada. Length of nanosecond http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8
especially when compared to Röntgen who used lead to isolate him some time before her http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Röntgen
We should fight this attitude. Women have a history of being judged solely on their looks, and that is wrong. Everyone should be judged on their merits.
He was very bright in many ways, but wasn't perfect. For example he didn't care much for gender equality. Women could just stay in the kitchen as far as he was concerned.
(a) Just because a thing happens doesn't mean that it's right that a thing happens. "Hey murder happens" is not a acceptable response when someone points out that murder is wrong.
(b) Women are often judged much more on their sexual/beauty looks, compared to men. Can you find an instance of a beauty/sexual attractiveness of a male scientist being mentioned?
Curie is a figurehead of the nuclear era, while Lovelace's importance is seen to be in the genesis of the computer era. Even ignoring the "nuclear == icky" aspect, people (likely rightly) associate computers with something that is more important in their own lives.
She's a hero here in France but I don't know about her reputation in the English speaking world.
She was a very amazing person. Born in Poland, she studied secretly for years in her native country, because higher education was not opened to females! Then she moved to Paris to join her sister and continued her education during the day, while tutoring in the evenings to pay for it.
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There was a nice play (in French) that I saw in 1989, called "Les Palmes de monsieur Schutz"
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Palmes_de_monsieur_Schutz
A movie was later made from the play. I didn't see the movie but hear it's not too bad for that kind of adaptation from scene to screen (and it has cameos from Pierre-Gilles de Gennes and Georges Charpak).
and obviously in Poland. But here we call her with her full Polish(hers)-French(husband) name, not only the French part.
a new bridge in Warsaw was recently named after her http://goo.gl/maps/Y1X5d
It was created as communist-approved alternative to KUL(Catholic University of Lublin - the only university independent from communist government in 1944-1989 Poland). Now it's the other way around (KUL is heavily influenced by catholic church, and umcs is more-or-less independent).
BTW - my university uses French order of writting Maria name "Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej w Lublinie". Maria sometimes used French order (with husband surname first), and sometimes used Polish order (with husband surname second), but rarely skipped "Skłodowska" altogether.
It's not nice, but I think it's OK to call her a French scientist. Poland clearly didn't want her. It is an old tradition that best polish scientists, athletes and inventors go abroad. They're not valued in the country.
Maybe America is a bad example, since we're all about accepting immigrants as Americans. :)
What she learnt in Poland she learnt from Polish teachers that taught Poles secretly in homes (because it was forbidden to teach some subjects - not only to woman, but to anyone - for example Polish history).
And she was always supportive of Polish independence, named Polonium after Poland, kept her name after mariage to associate with Poland. Wouldn't happen if she had problems with Poland, don't you think?
I think you project modern problems on historical situation.
Sclo like it's halfway between a and o, _not_ an “oh”.
imagine yourself having fun with your ignorance of some jewish scientist, it's exactly the same problem, even though more Poles died during WWII than jews
BTW counting victims is really bad style. Most were Polish Jews, and how you count them depends on what you want to prove.
... since we recently had a story about recognizing contributions of polish people: http://www.smh.com.au/world/honour-for-overlooked-poles-who-...
The need to celebrate the one symbolic "woman of science" is sexist and crude. The idea of one "woman of science" makes the work of other female scientists seem less important. The idea that the "woman of science" be symbolic makes Marie Curie's work seem symbolic and unimportant.
Why can we not just celebrate both Marie Curie and Ada Lovelace as excellent scientists, leaving gender out of the discussion?
I think it's perfectly legitimate to celebrate Marie Curie but at the same time also celebrate Ada Lovelace, and I don't see how the two are in competition.
If we're going down that route, why are we paying so much attention to Alan Turing, who elected him as the man in science? Aren't there other computer pioneers worth celebrating? Well, yes, but talking about Turing doesn't lessen them.
And, for that matter, why do women have to be their own category at all? Why does "Ada Lovelace Day" automatically mean "Woman Day", does that mean that we should also elect one single man to name a day after?
I don't accept the premise of the article that Marie Curie isn't celebrated in her own right. I'd say you'd be hard-pressed to find a woman in any science who isn't aware of both of these women's contributions along with Grace Hopper, Rosalind Franklin and others.
>why do women have to be their own category at all?
Well, among the many many reasons that require a large number of comments to annunciate all the possible arguments here's a simple one: when there aren't many of your minority group in any field, celebrating a member of your group enables more members of your group to enter the field because precedence is set.
That's not the premise of my article. The premise is that Marie Curie would make a much better figurehead than Ada Lovelace.
What I object to is that apparently women are strictly confined to this particular category, so that 1) there is a ranking of women and only one can be THE woman of science, and 2) women cannot have their own day but have to compete for the "woman day". That is, woman becomes the all-compassing defining trait, and they are only recognized within the constraints of that classification. That, I think, is tragic.
As an example, Sally Ride mattered a lot to me (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4283227) even though I'm a man, as I wrote when she died: "RIP Sally Ride. She was a personal inspiration as a child because I saw a woman going into space as an indication of the opening up of space to 'normal' people. She was also a scientist and not a military person."
No one. He isn't "the man in science" - only a few computer geeks know about him. The man in science is Einstein.
I seriously doubt the man on the street could name anyone else, with the possible exception of "schizophrenic Russel Crowe".
The choice of Turing as an example: He was a closer match to Lovelace in being a computer science pioneer.
I keep referring back to this topic more and more these days... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiglers_law_of_eponymy
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/quackcures.htm (see the bottom of the page)
Most of them seem to originate in Japan.
The summary of Lovelace in the OP brought this back to mind as it is exactly what my stance had been when I'd ditched it for the more conservative "well I guess I don't really know". I never looked into it again until now. Does anyone have a recommendation for a balanced modern summary of her contribution?
I believe most of what I had read by Swade was written before she was as popular in the CS community as she now is, and when I raised his points in discussion I was usually told he was widely regarded to hold a grudge against her for some reason no-one really understood.
Who told you that?
For an independent (of Swade) analysis you might like to read Bruce Collier's 1970 PhD thesis (http://robroy.dyndns.info/collier/index.html). This was written well before Swade was on the Babbage case and was based on reading of the primary documents. A couple of quotes from it:
"In the summer of 1843, Menabrea's paper was translated by Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, and only legitimate daughter of Lord Bryon; she composed, in extensive consultation with Babbage, a series of long notes to the paper, which together comprised about three times the length of Menabrea's original version. The whole was published in Richard Taylor's Scientific Memoirs for 1843, 92 under the title "Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq;" this was the only extensive paper on the Analytical Engine published in English during Babbage's life, or, indeed, up to the present. Although it is clear that Lady Lovelace was a woman of considerable interest and talent, and it is clear that she understood to a very considerable degree Babbage's ideas about the general character and significance of the Analytical Engine, and expressed them well in her notes to Menabrea's paper, it is equally clear that the ideas were indeed Babbage's and not hers; indeed, she never made any claim to the contrary. She made a considerable contribution to publicizing the Analytical Engine, but there is no evidence that she advanced the design or theory of it in anyway. And she did not even express an interest in learning about the machine until January 5, 1841, 93 even as late as June 30, 1843, she apparently knew quite little about the mechanical details of the Engine"
"All of this is said not to belittle Lady Lovelace, but because a very exaggerated view has been formed by some recent writers of the significance of her contribution to the Engine or of her role in Babbage's life."
The citations for those parts are Babbage's personal correspondence with Lovelace that are held by the British Museum.