If you like reading about Wu from a woman in physics hidden in plain sight aspect you might like the story of Emmy Noether[0].
A mathematician who worked a few doors down from Einstein and produced era defining result in physics. The connection between symmetry and conservation. Noether's theorem to this day is one of the most profound holy shit moments in many physicists education.
Noether’s lack of recognition has nothing to do with her gender. Her symmetry theorem is known to any undergrad student in physics.
The general public simply doesn’t know about physicists (beyond Einstein and Newton). In fact the general public is more likely to know of Neil deGrasse Tyson than far more influential physicists in the 20th century. Most people aren’t aware of Dirac, von Neumann, Schrödinger, Bohr, Wigner, etc…
I think she's actually genuinely underecognized, but that it has to do with that her most notable work is a theoretical result and not a physical theory, and thus something only appreciated by people who read theory, like university students in physics or mathematics.
What’s interesting about this discussion is that she had far more results in mathematics than physics. She was a pioneer in commutative algebra and discovered a lot of fundamental theorems and concepts in commutative algebra.
Indeed, people in this thread are way overestimating how many average people even know who Euler is.
It’s OK if mathematicians are obscure in the general population. That’s part of the deal when you become a mathematician. I don’t know many footballers either.
I would much rather the general public filled their heads with basic mathematical concepts, rather than the names of mathematicians. As Feynman said (paraphrasing), knowing the name of something is rather useless if you don’t know anything else about it.
I'd suggest this meets the definition of hiding in plain sight.
The general public is interested in female contributions to science on the whole. And they would appreciate knowing about Noether. And the physics community by an large does know her.
But that information has not escaped the relatively esoteric setting of physics education.
On top of that I'd be curious how many of those who know of the symmetry conservation link, know of it as Noether's theorem and how many know Noether was a woman. I bet not much! Just speculation.
Again that would be hiding in plain sight in my book.
NGL when learning Noether’s theorem I thought Emmy was short for something like Emiliano. It wasn’t until long afterwards that I found out that she was a she, and the struggles she had along the way because of that.
At the time I wouldn’t have cared anyway. I was bombarded with so many names of people through equations, experiments, etc that I didn’t care if they were a man, woman, or carrier pigeon. I just cared what the result meant and how I could use it. It’s only after the fact, long after I left academia, that I started to see these people as humans with real lives and stories.
> The general public simply doesn’t know about physicists (beyond Einstein and Newton).
I find this odd. We were taught about Rutherford/Bohr and their work in high school - unless the general public if full of people who haven't gone to school or dropped out before high school, they should know these scientists (even if one may not remember the specifics after a long time).
My secondary school classes[1] covered a lot of those names but made no mention of Noether, which you'd think merits at least a "you won't understand it but here's why conservation laws exist". I'm not going to speculate on reasons/motivations but it really does seem to be a huge oversight.
[1] IB curriculum, not exactly a de minimis environment
If you did IB, you may have heard of Schrodinger and Bohr because of their involvement in quantum mechanics and the modelling of the atom model. I'd be shocked if you learned about Wigner for example.
Noether's theorem is a much more difficult result to teach high school students, because you do need some mathematical maturity before learning it. In the UK, you're taught it in a second year undergraduate course in classical mechanics.
So it is not an oversight.
Also people here seem to be overstating the influence of Noether as a physicist. Yes, her theorem is a profound result in physics but the majority of her contributions were in pure mathematics.
Wu is quite well known too within the physicist community.
But go to the street ask the first 100 people you come across to list their top 5 important contributions by woman in maths or physics. What's on it? How many will mention Noether? I'd say about as many as Wu. Less than 1.
Probably few could name many. Maybe it'll be the woman led the team to image the black hole at the centre of the galaxy. Will anyone know her name though? I don't.
Ada Lovelace is better known but not for maths or physics. She was a mathematician of course.
You could argue there were (and are) disproportionately more men in science (for various reasons) and most important contributions have been through them (related to previous and other various reasons), without making the gender argument.
No one on the street knows anything accurate about physics at all in that limit.
Lovelace gets way too much credit considering there are a bunch of much more important women even just within CS. "First programmer" is egregious IMO (often her label), as if Babbage didn't think to program it.
Perhaps you're right (I don't know), but I note that Lovelace had insight on the usefulness of computers for solving a broader class of problems than previously thought, and this was an important contribution in its own right
In any case, often the opposite of what you are describing happens: women get disproportionately less credit than male collaborators, even when they made bigger contributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_effect
edit: Stephen Wolfram has this to say about her contributions:
> In his book, Idea Makers, Stephen Wolfram defends Lovelace's contributions. While acknowledging that Babbage wrote several unpublished algorithms for the Analytical Engine prior to Lovelace's notes, Wolfram argues that "there's nothing as sophisticated—or as clean—as Ada's computation of the Bernoulli numbers. Babbage certainly helped and commented on Ada's work, but she was definitely the driver of it." Wolfram then suggests that Lovelace's main achievement was to distill from Babbage's correspondence "a clear exposition of the abstract operation of the machine—something which Babbage never did".[91]
If instead of asking a physicist you turn to a historian of science (that is a person deriving authority by virtue of being a subject matter expert instead of from being a rich programmer) you get something like the following story:
> It was attributed to her, but—as Herschel hinted—Babbage may have had an input; it is impossible to know how much. Most famously, one of her additional notes, G, sets out a table for calculating what are called the Bernoulli numbers, which carry great mathematical significance. Even if she was solely responsible for it, the chart is not a program, but shows the stages that would occur in a pre-programmed machine if one existed.
> Heroes are made, not born. If computer scientists feel they need a 19th-century ancestor, then perhaps Herman Hollerith should supplant Babbage? To tabulate the US census, Hollerith invented eponymous punched cards which are still being used 100 years later—and he also founded a company that became the international giant IBM.
> And as a female role model, the American mathematics graduate Grace Hopper seems eminently more suitable than London’s flighty Victorian socialite. A rear admiral in the US Navy during the Second World War, this programming pioneer gave her name to a powerful supercomputer. Hopper revolutionised the digital world by insisting that instead of forcing people to communicate in symbolic code, computers should be taught to speak English. She also made a permanent mark on the English language—the term “debugging” was coined after she removed a moth that had flown inside some circuitry.
A mathematician who worked a few doors down from Einstein and produced era defining result in physics. The connection between symmetry and conservation. Noether's theorem to this day is one of the most profound holy shit moments in many physicists education.
Her life was been cut tragically short.
[0] https://youtu.be/04ERSb06dOg