Noether, E.
Kept a conservatory.
For a charge, anybody
Could contribute a symmetry.
Noether's theorem, linking symmetries to conservation laws, is often quoted as the deepest result in physics.
Rosalind Franklin
Never went spirallin',
The two-fold way
Bein' in her DNA.
Franklin's imaging of DNA via X-ray diffraction established its double spiral structure.
Goeppert Mayer, Maria
Had a business idea.
She sold on the seaside
Shells of every nuclide.
Goeppert Mayer co-developed the shell model describing nuclei and co-garnered the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Vera Florence Cooper Rubin
Gave her plate a mighty spin.
"This," she smiled at her puzzled host, "is how I
Test if there's more than meets the eye."
Rubin's cutting-edge measurements of the rotations of galaxies provided major evidence for dark matter lurking around them.
Eschewed crème brûlée
Fearing it'd depriva
Of vis viva.
Among other things, du Châtelet helped settle debates on the conservation of energy and advocated for the use of vis visa, which is two times kinetic energy.
Edavalath Kakkat Janaki Ammal
Ordered a coffee, black, small.
She mused, sipping a milliliter,
I can make the bean more bitter.
The "woman who sweetened India's sugarcane," Janaki Ammal's work on cross-breeding sugarcane hybrids led to a high-yielding strain .
Jocelyn Bell
Stands sentinel.
When a giant lulls
She checks its pulse.
Bell discovered pulsars, fast-spinning neutron stars that emit electromagnetic radiation from its poles detected on Earth like the pulses of a spinning lighthouse.
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace
Strove to keep a straight face
As her screen unfurled:
"H E L L O, W O R L D!"
Lovelace is identified as the first computer programmer.
Lise Meitner
Was a mood-brightener.
Her penetrating wits
Would leave you in splits.
Meitner co-discovered nuclear fission.
Hedy Lamarr,
Come the War,
Staged a hamming
On dodging jamming.
Hollywood actress Lamarr was also a part-time inventor, co-filing a patent for a radio guidance system for torpedoes that used the techniques of spread spectrum and frequency hopping to thwart enemy interference and jamming.
Madame Chien-Shiung Wu
Had a left-handed screw.
She sent it through a mirror
And made it disappear.
Madame Wu's measurements of the decay of radioactive cobalt-60 demonstrated that the weak interaction, one of the four fundamental forces, acts only on particles with left-handed helicity and hence vanishes in a mirror world.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt
Caught a firefly and gave it --
Seeing it pulse sadder and gladder --
A place in the distance ladder.
Leavitt discovered a relationship between the pulse frequency and brightness of a kind of star called a Cepheid variable, which dims and brightens periodically. This serves as a calibration to determine cosmic-scale distances.
Curie
Was merry
Preferring isotopes (of uranium)
To heliotropes (or geranium).
Curie collected a Physics Nobel for her studies of radioactivity and a Chemistry Nobel for discovering radium and polonium.
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