ALD21: Klára Dán von Neumann, Computer Scientist

Klára Dán von Neumann

Klára Dán von Neumann

An early computer programmer, Klára Dán von Neumann led the team that produced the first computer-generated 12-hour and 24-hour retrospective weather forecasts. Despite having had little mathematical education, she became one of the primary programmers for the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) for this project.

In the late 1940s, Dán von Neumann worked with her husband, John von Neumann, on turning the ENIAC into one of the first stored-program computers, able to run programs that had been stored in binary code on a memory device. Until then programs had to be entered and re-entered by hand.

The ENIAC then became the focus of The Meteorology Project, which aimed to use the computer to generate weather forecasts. Using data from past storms, they produced two 12-hour and 24-hour retrospective forecasts. Not only was that the first time a weather forecast had been produced by computer, it was also the first time a computer had been used to conduct a physics experiment.

Dán von Neumann was instrumental to the project, checking the final code for the experiment, training programmers, hand-punching and managing the 100,000 punch-cards that were used for storing the program, and ensuring that no data was lost. This was difficult and highly technical work.

Born in Hungary in 1911, Klára won the national figure skating championship aged just 14. She married John von Neumann in 1938, and the couple moved to the US because of the rising antisemitism in Europe.

Further reading

ALD21 Books: The Alchemy of Us, Ainissa Ramirez

Ainissa Ramirez

The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, Ainissa Ramirez

In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines eight inventions-clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips-and reveals how they shaped the human experience. Ramirez tells the stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the way to the computer. 

She describes, among other things, how our pursuit of precision in timepieces changed how we sleep; how the railroad helped commercialize Christmas; how the necessary brevity of the telegram influenced Hemingway’s writing style; and how a young chemist exposed the use of Polaroid’s cameras to create passbooks to track black citizens in apartheid South Africa. These fascinating and inspiring stories offer new perspectives on our relationships with technologies.

Ramirez shows not only how materials were shaped by inventors but also how those materials shaped culture, chronicling each invention and its consequences-intended and unintended. Filling in the gaps left by other books about technology, Ramirez showcases little-known inventors-particularly people of color and women-who had a significant impact but whose accomplishments have been hidden by mythmaking, bias, and convention. Doing so, she shows us the power of telling inclusive stories about technology. She also shows that innovation is universal-whether it’s splicing beats with two turntables and a microphone or splicing genes with two test tubes and CRISPR.

Order the book on Bookshop.org.uk here and your purchase will support a local independent bookshop of your choice!

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @ainissaramirez
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ainissa
Website: www.ainissaramirez.com

ALD21: Professor Priyamvada Natarajan, Astrophysicist

Professor Priyamvada Natarajan

Professor Priyamvada Natarajan is a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University who has worked in a variety of fields such as gravitational lensing, galaxy formation and supermassive black holes. She developed a way to map dark matter using gravitational lensing, or the bending of light around galaxies. Her techniques for developing dark matter maps are now standard in cosmology.

She loved astronomy from a young age, eventually doing computations for the Nehru Planetarium, India, after she impressed the director with a program she had written to plot sky maps.

Natarajan got her PhD in 1998 from University of Cambridge, and was elected to a fellowship at Trinity College, the first woman in astrophysics to achieve this. During her graduate research, she wrote a paper predicting that supermassive black holes would create a “black hole wind”, blowing stellar material thousands of light years away. This gas would then accrete and form stars, resulting in galaxies and globular clusters that were short of dark matter. This theoretical prediction was later proven correct by a team of researchers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Virginia, in 2019.

She became a professor at Yale University, where she explored the formation of bright quasars that are powered by huge black holes, but which were formed early in the history of the universe, at the same time that stars were beginning to form. She suggested a process to explain how these black holes may have formed, without an accretion of stellar material, via the “direct-collapse” of gas disks. This process is now considered to be one of the main ways in which black holes form.

In 2009, Natarajan became a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and won India’s “Face of the Future” award. She received an India Empire NRI award for Achievement in the Sciences in 2011, and more recently, the University of Delhi gave her a lifetime honorary professorship. She is also active in supporting women in STEM, acting as Chairman for Yale’s Women Faculty Forum.

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @sheerpriya
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/priya-natarajan-66b0215
Website: campuspress.yale.edu/priya/

Further reading

ALD21 Podcasts: The Root of the Science, Anne Chisa

Anne Chisa

The Root of the Science, Anne Chisa

The Root of the Science Podcast airs every Monday. Host Anne Chisa, aka Anne with an E, interviews guests from around the world, highlighting the work of Africans in STEM and giving them the opportunity to tell their stories in their own voice, and to talk about their research or projects. Chisa finds out why they got into STEM (the ROOT of their science) and has in-depth conversations about their lives, both in and away from the science.

Recent episodes feature:

  • Sandiso Ngwenya, PhD student in chemistry, who describes her love of beauty, the stereotypes of what female scientists are supposed to look like and how women such as herself are changing that;
  • Tracy Vongai Mapfumo, a passion-driven entrepreneur, food innovator, crop scientist;
  • Dr Cosnet Lerato Rametse, a clinician scientist, MD & PhD candidate in immunology, and her passion for pathology; and,
  • Faith February, PhD mature student in oceanography at the University of Cape Town who is researching the effects of atmospheric aerosols on climate change.

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @Annelinda_c and @RootofSciPod
Facebook: facebook.com/anne.chisa
Instagram: @rootofscipod
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/anne-chisa
Website: linktr.ee/RootofSciencePodcasts

ALD21: Professor Dame Pratibha Gai, Materials Chemist and Electron Microscopist

Pratibha Gai

Professor Dame Pratibha Gai

Professor Dame Pratibha Gai co-invented the atomic resolution environmental transmission electron microscope (ETEM), which allows scientists to visualise and analyse gas-catalyst reactions at an atomic scale, leading to a better understanding of how catalysts work. 

Over two decades, Gai and her team redesigned a standard electron microscope. They drilled a hole through the imaging lens so that gas could be pumped into the electron microscope chamber, turning it into a chemical reaction vessel that could be used at high temperatures and pressures. 

Using the ETEM, Gai became the first person to see “columns of atoms” interacting in real time during a reaction. Before the ETEM, such high resolution microscopy could only be done before or after a chemical reaction had taken place – it wasn’t possible to watch the reaction happening. 

“I could see how a substrate interacted with a noble metal nanoparticle catalyst and watch the changing structure at atomic level,” she told Wiley Analytical Science Magazine. “It was thrilling.”

The newest version of the microscope is the environmental scanning transmission electron microscope (ESTEM), which allows scientists to see individual atoms undergoing chemical reactions. 

Gai uses the ESTEM to more fully understand chemical reactions and to develop catalysts for use in fields such as medicine and sustainable materials. She has developed antibiotic nanoparticles to control infection in medical implants, and an environmentally responsible nanocoating process for strong polymers and coatings.

Gai became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire For services to Chemical Sciences and Technology in 2018, and a L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Awards Laureate for Europe in 2013. She’s also an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society, and the Royal Microscopical Society. 

Further reading