Remarkable Names

The father of computer science and a leading theorist of artificial intelligence, Alan Turing is considered one of the 20th century's most important people. After being persecuted for his homosexuality by the government he helped save, he took his own life in 1954.

Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, most known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer. Today she is mainly recognized for having written the first algorithm to be processed by a machine, which was Charles Babbage's analytical engine.

Dorothy Vaughan was an American mathematician who worked at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the predecessor agency to NASA. In 1949, she was the first black woman to be promoted to department head at NASA.

Alice Augusta Ball was an American chemist who developed an injectable oil that was the most efficient method for treating leprosy until the 1940s. She was also the first woman and the first black person to graduate from the University of Hawaii and obtain a master's degree.

Marie Curie was a Polish-born French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research into radioactivity. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, being also the first person and the only woman to win it twice, as well as being the only person to be awarded in two different scientific fields.

Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician, physicist and space scientist. She made fundamental contributions to U.S. aeronautics and space exploration, particularly in computing applications at NASA. 

Jack Thomas Andraka is an inventor, scientist and researcher. At the young age of 15, he created a novel paper sensor that could detect three different types of cancer, all in around five minutes. Although the method is still in study phase, he is a very important name in oncology studies, and a figure for the LGBTQIA+ youth, being openly gay since 13 years old.

Sally Kristen Ride was an astronaut from the United States and the first American woman to go to space, after the Soviets Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, writer and science popularizer. He is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space and a research associate in the department of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History.