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The above courtesy of xkcd, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. |
How can you not admire Curie? Let's face it: she kicks all of our butts.
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Lise Meitner. Photo in US public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. |
The majority of scientists aren’t the Nobel laureates, the ones who get remembered in textbooks. For a male scientist to be remembered in the past, it was often enough to make a minor discovery; for a female scientist to be remembered, she had to be better than all her colleagues in addition to overcoming the sexism endemic in academic life. Personally, as a theoretical physicist, I wish I could be half as noteworthy as Noether. Who wouldn’t aspire to that, male or female?
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Emmy Noether. Photo in US public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. |
Science keeps pushing on, and that's a good thing. We are surrounded by women every bit as awesome as Marie Curie – you yourself may be one of those women. You don't have to win two Nobel Prizes or discover new elements to be rad. (See what I did there?) There's a whole other post to be written about how the Nobel Prize singles out just a few people when science is a collaborative venture, but I'll spare you all. Let's not worry about being Marie Curie or presenting her as the best there can be for women in science. With so many more people working and contributing than there were in 1903, there may never be another Curie, but that's not a bad thing.
There can be a hundred Curies.
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