histsci

337d

Happy birthday to #mathematician & geodesist Gladys West (née Brown in 1930)! Shown with satellite tracks & 3 satellites important to her career: Seasat, GEOS-3 & a GPS satellite. Her work, using math to precisely model the shape of Earth, laid the groundwork for GPS! Born to sharecropper parents in Virginia, she graduated with a Math BSc in ‘52 then MSc at VSU in ‘55. 🧵1/n
#linocut #printmaking #womenInSTEM #BlackInSTEM #histsci #Spacetober #EarthScience #Math

My linocut portrait of Gladys West with 3 satellites important to her career in indigo in from of world map with satellites tracks in blue.

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89d

Happy birthday to #physicist Harriet Brooks (1876 - 1933) who discovered atomic recoil, Radon & recognized radioactive elements could undergo chains of transmutations into a series of new elements. #nuclear #physics⁠
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She was Rutherford’s 1st grad student at McGill. After publishing her results in 1899 she completed her MSc in 1901 on “Damping of Electrical Oscillations,” before embarking on #radioactivity research.⁠ 🧵
⁠ #linocut #printmaking #sciart #womenInSTEM #histsci

My 9.25" x 12.5" linocut portrait of physicist Harriet Brooks (1876 - 1933) in a gradient of turquoise to green, shows her and her discovery of atomic recoil in gold (Radon gives off an alpha particle and daughter nucleus goes in opposite direction). A series of diagrams at the bottom shows how the Rutherford research group understood chains of radioactive active transmutations at the time.

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