Women in Astronomy IV 4400 YEARS AGO EN

Women in Astronomy IV

4400 YEARS AGO EN HEDU’ANNA c. 2334 BCE something has been created that no one has created before

We have her “portrait” Alabaster disk showing En Hedu’anna in procession – University of Pennsylvania Museum

We know her Living Quarters ziggurat

En Hedu' anna was one of the primary forerunners of astronomy and mathematics. She, along with other priestesses, created observatories with which to view the stars, planets, and the Moon and map their motion. She helped create one of the first calendars. It is still used today to date Easter, Passover, Ramadan and other religious events.

AND WE HAVE HER WRITING on tablets en he du an na

The Hymn to Inanna Tablet Like a dragon you have filled the land with venom. Like thunder when you roar over the Earth, trees and plants fall before you. You are a flood descending from a mountain, O primary one, moon goddess Inanna of heaven and earth! University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia (Neg. #S 8 -80401)

The historian Paul Kriwaczek writes, "Her compositions, …, remained models of petitionary prayer …. Through the Babylonians, they influenced and inspired the prayers and psalms of the Hebrew Bible and the Homeric hymns of Greece. Through them, … faint echoes can even be heard in the hymnody of the early Christian church"

FROM HER POEMS "The true woman who possesses exceeding wisdom, She consults a tablet of lapis lazuli leader She gives advice to all lands. . . astronomer She measures off the heavens, She places the measuring-cords on the Earth. " mathematician “in the gipar the priestesses’ rooms that princely shrine of cosmic order they track the passage of the Moon. ”

Hildegard: 11 th century scholar leader musician writer mystic healer artist

Hildegard’s science • “The stars gravitate around the Sun just as the Earth attracts the creatures which inhabit it” universal gravitation • “If it is cold in winter time on the part of the Earth which we inhabit, then the other part must be warm, in order that the temperature of the Earth may always be in equilibrium” thermodynamics

Cover from book written by Marie Cunitz 17 th century

SOMMERVILLE, MARY scientist 1780 -1872 Preliminary Dissertation on the Mechanism of the Heavens. Mécanique Céleste by La. Place Into English textbook "The magnetic properties of the violet rays of the solar spectrum" The Connection of the Physical Sciences Physical Geography Molecular and Microscopic Science I had studied plane and spherical trigonometry, conic sections, and Fergusson's Astronomy. I think it was immediately after my return to Scotland that I attempted to read Newton's Principia. I found it extremely difficult, and certainly did not understand it till I returned to it some time after, when I studied that wonderful work with great assiduity, and wrote numerous notes and observations on it.

Mary Sommerville • In [astronomy] we perceive the operation of a force which is mixed up with everything that exists in the heavens or on earth; which pervades every atom, rules the motions of animate and inanimate beings, and is as sensible in the descent of a rain-drop as in the falls of Niagara; in the weight of the air, as in the periods of the Moon • "If after the lapse of years the tables formed from a combination of numerous observations should be still inadequate to represent the motions of Uranus, the discrepancies may reveal the existence, nay, even the mass and orbit of a body placed for ever beyond the sphere of vision“

In February 2016 she was shortlisted, along with Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell and civil engineer Thomas Telford, in a public competition run by Royal Bank of Scotland to decide whose face should appear on the bank's new £ 10 notes, to be issued in 2017 Later that month RBS announced that she had won the public vote, held on Facebook. The new banknotes, bearing her image, are scheduled to be issued in the second half of 2017.

Sofia Kovalevskaya – the Princess Scientist

Sofia Kovalevskaya In January 2000, we celebrated her 150 th centennial jubilee Anniversary Professionals in math, mechanics, physics, astronomy, history and literature gathered to acknowledge heritage. Her legacy was 9 major works: 3 of pure mathematics, 1 on celestial mechanics, 2 on the physics of crystals, and 3 on rigid body rotational motion Addendum and remarks to La. Place’s Saturn’s rings research – the more general solution of La. Place’s problem of stability of a 3 D torus-like ring in rotation

“As decidedly as that 2 + 2 = 4, what a monstrosity is a woman who is a professor of mathematics, and how unnecessary, injurious and out of place she is. ” Strindberg – Sofia Kovaleskaya got the job anyway!

Nina Cassian born 1924, Galati, Rumania I’ve stitched my dress with continents, bound the equator round my waist. I waltz to a steady rhythm, bending slightly. I can’t stop my arms plunging into galaxies, gloved to elbows in adhesive gold; I carry on my arms a star’s vaccine. With such greedy sight my eyelids flutter in the breeze like a strange enthusiastic plant. No one fears me except Error Who is everywhere.