Marie Curie voted top female boffin

And for Food

Google a Film called "Young EinStien"

B rate is a under statment

The sad thing is

... there are (were?) so few to choose from.

Ask any slice of the british public - outside a university town, to name a woman scientist and hers would probably be the only one that "the man in the street" could come up with. Leaving aside all the fictional ones and the science presenters (many of whom have more than adequate scientific qualifications) the field is remarkably small.

However if you asked the same MitS to name any 2 male scientists, I would expect the overwhelming answer to be Einstein, followed after along pause by "that guy in the wheelchair? yooooo know - wassis name?".

My nursery school

was on Curie Avenue. I haven't seen any other female scientist with a road named after them. I think we need -as the article said- more celebration of current female scientists.

@ Pete 2

'However if you asked the same MitS to name any 2 male scientists, I would expect the overwhelming answer to be Einstein, followed after along pause by "that guy in the wheelchair? yooooo know - wassis name?".'

Davros????

Huh?

Rubbish top 10.

What about Grace Brewster Murray? Pivotal mathematician and developer of COBOL, inventor of the compiler, forerunner of Mathematica and a rear admiral in the Navy.

Definite heroine of mine - (if not number one of all time), as an electonics engineer myself.

As a quote of a quote - she believed that "we've always done it that way" was not necessarily a good reason to continue to do so.

Unorthodox and inspirational. Check out her CV. It's like War & Peace.

Adam

RE: No Grace Hopper, either? and Huh?

Also... no Ada Lovelace....

Hedy Lamarr

Spread Spectrum ...from subs to WiFi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum

First Scientist

What about Eve?

Grace Hopper

She deserves her place, but not in top science. Proper science - nature science - is about fundamentally explaining how our universe works.

Computer science is, as a lecturer pointed out to me many, many years ago a branch of engineering; that is engineering science. It makes our world work better - it doesn't explain it. In fact Grace Hopper had more to do with project management than anything else. She steered through one of the first real international standards, even if what came out was a language which was exquisitely ugly and mundane. That was the style of the day - Fortran was of the same era, and another vocational language of plodding inelegance.

Nope - they got it right. Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin (for those believing in French conspiracies, the latter also worked in Paris for several years). Rosalind Franklin was much maligned by James Watson, an unpleasant character who engaged in what was a posthumous character assassination of her in his book, The Double Helix. Both appear to have been killed by dallying with ionising radiation. I rather wish I'd have met Rosalind Franklin - I think I would have been very intimidated.

Anna Ford

and the other Tommorow's World presenters, such as, Judith Hann

I don't think you can view science 'heroes' like sporting heroes, anyway, it's not as if men or boys want to be like Einstein.

@Steven Jones

Real Computer Science is a real science and explains the fundamental limitations to sorting efficiency, compiler theory etc. Turing et al. (he could half get this prize).

It's just that real computer computer science is not taught.

Learning to program at university might be carried out by the computer science faculty, but that does not make it computer science. Computer science, as taught at universities, should really be an engineering discipline (ie. computer engineering or software engineering).

Heather Couper

Heather Couper?

@Graham B

> it's because less women *want* to do it

Yes, but why is that? It's partly cultural. If you go to some countries, 50% of the engineers are women. So there is no "natural" bias. A project like this can try to change expectations and encourage more women into engineering. Which can only be a good thing (looking around the office here).

Science - Schmience!

The engineering/science fault line is a mirage. I stand by my choice. Boffinry knows no bounds or gender (or genus - my cat has just worked out how to open the fridge door!). If we stick to no engineering, Hodgkin would have to go from the list. Now we have a real mess!

I also agree with Ada Lovelace - though what stuns me about her, is that she achieved everything before her death at just 36. Wow!

Although, I have to come clean. I am not a fan of gender only achievement lists or 'Top woman this', 'Top woman that'. My professional body tried this ages ago. It got headlines, but nothing else. Getting women into into science and engineering is still, sadly, very hard. Shame really. Missed opportunities abound.

Asimuth99.

@Charles Manning

I have a prejudice towards natural science. Computer Science, which is closely related to Mathematics, is not a natural science - it's a a formal science. That is fundamentally an exercise in formal processes, logic and the like. All very important and useful and an essential tool of natural sciences, but they do not, in themselves seeks to explain the universe (albeit that natural science models are usually expressed mathematically).

Natural science is not like that at all - it is based on observations and the generation and testing of theories to explain these natural events. it is unfortunate that the word scientist is used to cover so many area, many of which are not even closxel related. For instance, there is a discipline (I use the term loosely) called political science, but I'd have real trouble accepting academics in that subject as being scientists in anything vaguely like the same sense as, say, a physicist. Also engineers would have difficulty claiming to be scientists.