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The Dragon Reborn, Robert Jordan. Still enjoying this! Most of the way through, and we just got introduced to a bunch of interesting new female characters.
Pure and Practical Women:
Mathematics, Science and Gender around 1900, with special reference to
Grace Chisholm Young and Hertha Ayrton, Claire Jones (link to download from British Library, also the author also has a published book based on this thesis).
So every so often I get reminded that I want steampunk Hertha Ayrton, and then I sometimes fall down a rabbit hole of research, as one does. This time I discovered this Ph.D. thesis, which features Hertha Ayrton and Grace Chisholm Young, two women who were written out of the history of science/math for different reasons (and have recently started being written back in). The book has a lot of fascinating background details, especially about Cambridge women's colleges and the examination culture in the Victorian era, but it's a dissertation on gender, not a comprehensive biography of either woman, and reading it cover-to-cover got to be a bit All Gender All the Time, when I really wanted to get to know these interesting women.
Hertha Ayrton really deserves a good book-length biography, but that's not what this book is trying to be. (I'm curious now and want to find the memoir of her written by her friend Evelyn Sharp, which was published in 1926, so should be in the public domain now, but Google books is only giving me snippets! I'm going to look into how to request that Google make its copy freely available.)
Also I should learn more about Grace Chisholm Young, a mathematician I'd been only vaguely aware of because a) she worked in parts of math that I'm less familiar with and b) she sacrified her own career to support her husband's.
Pure and Practical Women:
Mathematics, Science and Gender around 1900, with special reference to
Grace Chisholm Young and Hertha Ayrton, Claire Jones (link to download from British Library, also the author also has a published book based on this thesis).
So every so often I get reminded that I want steampunk Hertha Ayrton, and then I sometimes fall down a rabbit hole of research, as one does. This time I discovered this Ph.D. thesis, which features Hertha Ayrton and Grace Chisholm Young, two women who were written out of the history of science/math for different reasons (and have recently started being written back in). The book has a lot of fascinating background details, especially about Cambridge women's colleges and the examination culture in the Victorian era, but it's a dissertation on gender, not a comprehensive biography of either woman, and reading it cover-to-cover got to be a bit All Gender All the Time, when I really wanted to get to know these interesting women.
Hertha Ayrton really deserves a good book-length biography, but that's not what this book is trying to be. (I'm curious now and want to find the memoir of her written by her friend Evelyn Sharp, which was published in 1926, so should be in the public domain now, but Google books is only giving me snippets! I'm going to look into how to request that Google make its copy freely available.)
Also I should learn more about Grace Chisholm Young, a mathematician I'd been only vaguely aware of because a) she worked in parts of math that I'm less familiar with and b) she sacrified her own career to support her husband's.