CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@ColinTheMathmo @antoinechambertloir Colin, after reading ur replies, I guessed I understand what kinds of teaching materials you are trying to produce.

As others mentioned, the story that Sophie Germain pretended as male to work on math, and her communications with Lagrange and /Gauss/, is a good choice.

The life of Vera Rubin is also worth mentioning; her early career faced explicit sexism and she fought back. "Don't let anyone keep you down for silly reasons such as who you are. And don't worry about prizes and fame. The real prize is finding something new out there." What an encouraging quote! Also words disprise those scientists lost their integrity due to prize and fame.

/Hilbert/'s problems have been important. And Julia Robinson (thanks Antoine). [wikipedia]" ... was not allowed to teach in the Mathematics Department at Berkeley after marrying Raphael M. Robinson in 1941, ", and she chose to teach in Statistics department and left research math for 5~6 year. And she did that work related to the 10th Problem after getting the opportunity of back to math! This is another female story worth telling.

Julia Bowman Robinson - Biography

Julia B Robinson worked on computability, decision problems and non-standard models of arithmetic.

Maths History (mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk)

@ColinTheMathmo @antoinechambertloir Feel bad; as a female math enthusiasts on the above list I only knew Dusa McDuff, Maryam Mirzakhani, Olga Taussky-Todd... And I believe I did read Vera Sós's wiki-bio...

@ColinTheMathmo

"Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas" - Marie Curie

@ColinTheMathmo

Oh I had set a difficult/impossible task for myself...

I limited the scope to the 20th century.

I HAVE TO say Math as a historical intellectual field, was not fair enough to women. It is hard to find 'famous/iconic' discoveries by females in 20th century, EXCEPT Emmy Noether's work. I read on the wikipedia articles on "Hilbert's 23 problems", and all main contributors/pushers have been males. [*] On the other hand, I guess because CS had been a green field, there were less "traditions" and "restrictions", many pioneers in CS were/are females and some are trans (Lynn Conway). REF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pioneers_in_computer_science

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So, since I got some training in physics, I tried to identify the important events. I choose 4 important Physics events in 20th century which female scientists involved heavily:

1. Radioactivity - Marie Curie and Pierre Curie got the Nobel Prize in 1903

2. parity non-conservation in weak interaction - the experimental physicist Ms Chien-Shiung Wu proved Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang's theory, lead to the two males' Nobel Prize in 1957

3. Discovery of Dark Matter - Vera Rubin found the first evidence around 1970

4. Nuclear Weapons / Manhattan Project - Maria Goeppert Mayer, a Nobel Prize winner(1963, "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure"), had involved in the project.

I would like to list five events, maybe someone could help.

References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_physics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women_in_science

[*]: correction:https://mathstodon.xyz/@antoinechambertloir/116154031088146836

@ColinTheMathmo Oh I keep getting "pop" sounds from Mastodon... This is a hot thread.
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For ancient mathematics, I would choose these 6 events/concepts, which some non-western heroes appeared:

* π (See Zu Chongzhi 429-500 from ancient China, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Hui%27s_%CF%80_algorithm)

* Quadratic Equation (many non-western mathematicians worked out the quadratic formula)

* Zeno's paradoxes ( you can see some mentions of Chinese philosophers on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes#Similar_paradoxes )

* Prime Numbers

* trigonometry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_trigonometry)

* Euclid's 'Elements' (have to say it is a great work in human math history)

I think a grand human history is hard not to be biased, so why not first test on our specialization and leave behind "Macchiavelli", "Shakespeare", "Alexander the Great", ....

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Let me have some time for a partial list of important modern female heroines (and important non-binary)!

@ColinTheMathmo And I think we could address to the kids [admit the fact...] that in pre-modern times, because most women are repressed/underprivileged, most ancient characters being described in history were males, but in 18xx/19xx/20xx, more and more females and some trans contribute exceptional work to the humanity.

@ColinTheMathmo If I were you, I will address events more than "celebrities". It takes a village to raise a child, so it should take a whole culture to raise those great(exceptionally creative) humans, whose works are sometimes supported by other gifted but less "famous" humans .

@ColinTheMathmo why nearly all males