Drive: Ideas for sustained work. - Page 22

Editor’s note

Drive

Selected for practical perspectives on effort, recovery and sustained work.

Q1988

DriveBiography

Christine Darden developed computer models for predicting and reducing sonic booms, helping engineers reshape supersonic aircraft to soften their acoustic impact.

Darden arrived at NASA Langley in 1967 as a human computer, one of the last generation hired to perform calculations for engineers. Six years later she moved into aerospace engineering and wrote code to model the shock waves that gather into a sonic boom. Her work helped show that noise on the ground could be influenced by an aircraft's geometry rather than accepted as the fixed price of speed. She eventually led the sonic-boom group: the person once assigned the arithmetic came to shape the research question.

Christine DardenRead card

Q1989

DriveBiography

Annie Easley moved from hand calculation to programming, developing and testing code for energy systems, battery research and NASA's Centaur upper-stage rocket.

Easley joined the aircraft engine laboratory in Cleveland in 1955 as one of only four Black employees, calculating research problems by hand. As electronic computers took over, she learned FORTRAN and SOAP rather than letting automation define the edge of her career. Her code supported studies of alternative power and the liquid-hydrogen Centaur stage that sent spacecraft towards the Moon and planets. Adaptability here was not a slogan; it was a new syntax learned while the workplace itself was changing.

Annie EasleyRead card

Q1990

DriveBiography

Evelyn Boyd Granville helped formulate orbit calculations and computer procedures for Projects Vanguard and Mercury, then contributed mathematical support to Apollo-era work.

Granville earned her Yale doctorate in 1949, becoming one of the first Black women in the United States to receive a PhD in mathematics. At IBM's Vanguard Computing Centre she worked where celestial mechanics met early electronic programming, translating trajectories into procedures a machine could execute during the opening years of the space age. She later returned to the classroom for a long career in mathematics education. Her work moved in both directions: equations carried vehicles upward, and teaching carried knowledge forward.

Evelyn Boyd GranvilleRead card

Q1991

WonderBiography

Radia Perlman's spanning-tree algorithm lets network bridges agree on a loop-free path, blocking redundant links until a failure makes one useful again.

Redundant connections make a network resilient, but unmanaged loops can make frames circulate and multiply until communication collapses. Perlman's 1980s algorithm lets distributed switches elect a logical tree, temporarily quieting selected links while preserving them as alternative routes. If the topology changes, the tree can be calculated again. The elegance is institutional as much as mathematical: no central traffic officer is required, yet independent machines arrive at one workable map.

Radia PerlmanRead card

Q1992

WonderBiography

Maryam Mirzakhani won the 2014 Fields Medal for breakthroughs in the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces, becoming its first woman recipient.

A Riemann surface can be imagined as a flexible curved world, while its moduli space records the many forms such a world can take. Mirzakhani connected geometry, topology, probability and dynamical systems to count paths and reveal order in those spaces. She was known for working across large sheets of paper, drawing and revising until the problem became a landscape. The medal marked a historic first; the mathematics changed what others could see.

Maryam MirzakhaniRead card

Q1993

WonderBiography

Ingrid Daubechies constructed compactly supported orthonormal wavelets that made multiscale signal analysis practical for digital compression, denoising and reconstruction.

A Fourier analysis tells which frequencies exist, but wavelets can also preserve where a brief change or sharp edge occurs. Daubechies found finite, mathematically exact families that could be computed efficiently and reconstruct the original signal. Their descendants live in JPEG 2000, fingerprint storage, medical imaging and scientific data. Her abstraction succeeds because it is selective without being careless: it gives smooth areas less attention and spends detail where the world changes.

Ingrid DaubechiesRead card

Q1994

WonderBiography

Karen Uhlenbeck developed foundational methods in modern geometric analysis and gauge theory—work that made her the first woman to receive the Abel Prize in 2019.

Geometric equations can behave beautifully until energy concentrates and a sequence of smooth objects develops a singular point. Uhlenbeck's compactness and regularity ideas showed how to control that failure, preserving structure away from the places where a bubble forms. Those tools crossed between partial differential equations, geometry and mathematical physics. Her work did not remove every singularity; it made the moment of breakdown precise enough to become knowledge.

Karen UhlenbeckRead card

Q1995

DriveBiography

Fe del Mundo founded the Philippines' first paediatric hospital in 1957 and built programmes that carried child healthcare, training and disease prevention beyond its walls.

Del Mundo returned from postgraduate training in the United States as war reached the Philippines and cared for sick children in an internment camp. Frustrated by the limits of public institutions, she sold property to open the Children's Memorial Hospital in Quezon City, then linked specialist care with rural health workers and rehydration teams. She researched infectious disease, trained generations of clinicians and wrote a foundational Philippine paediatrics text. Her hospital was a building; her real design was a network of care.

Fe del MundoRead card

Q1996

DriveBiography

Jane C. Wright compared patients' responses with tests on their cultured tumour tissue, helping turn chemotherapy from a last gamble into a systematic field of cancer medicine.

At Harlem Hospital's Cancer Research Foundation, Wright and her father Louis grew samples of human tumours and exposed them to candidate drugs, then compared the laboratory response with what happened in the patient. She went on to investigate drug combinations, build a cross-referenced record of cancers and treatments, and develop catheter techniques for delivering potent agents to deep tumours. In a discipline still proving that medicines could treat cancer at all, she made response something to observe, compare and learn from.

Jane C. WrightRead card

Q1997

DriveBiography

Percy Lavon Julian achieved the first total synthesis of physostigmine, then devised industrial routes from soybean sterols to affordable starting materials for steroid medicines.

In 1935 Julian and Josef Pikl completed the total synthesis of physostigmine, making a scarce Calabar-bean compound more available for glaucoma treatment. At Glidden, Julian later recognised that water seeping into a vast soybean-oil tank had concentrated valuable sterols in a white deposit. He turned that accident into a production process whose intermediates fed the manufacture of progesterone and corticosteroid medicines. Laboratories had repeatedly closed doors to him because he was Black; he answered by opening routes through molecules at industrial scale.

Percy Lavon JulianRead card

Q1999

WonderBiography

Annie Jump Cannon classified more than 350,000 stellar spectra and refined the O-B-A-F-G-K-M sequence that became the enduring framework of spectral classification.

At Harvard College Observatory, women hired as 'computers' read glass plates while men commonly received the titles and telescopes. Cannon pared a tangled set of spectral classes into a clear sequence based on recurring features in starlight; later work showed that her order also runs from hotter stars towards cooler ones. Her speed was legendary, but the achievement was not mere sorting. By making hundreds of thousands of observations comparable, she turned an archive into an instrument for asking how stars differ and evolve.

Annie Jump CannonRead card

Q2000

DriveBiography

Gertrude B. Elion and George Hitchings designed drugs around biochemical differences between healthy cells and their targets, establishing principles of rational drug development.

Elion joined Hitchings at Burroughs Wellcome in 1944 and learned across chemistry, microbiology, pharmacology and virology. Their teams made analogues that could interrupt the metabolism of a tumour, microbe or immune cell more selectively than blind screening allowed. That programme yielded 6-mercaptopurine for leukaemia, azathioprine for transplantation, allopurinol for gout and later work central to acyclovir for herpes viruses. Her 1988 Nobel Prize honoured a method larger than any one medicine: begin with how life works, then design the interruption.

Gertrude B. ElionRead card

Q2002

WonderScience

A scanning tunnelling microscope maps a conducting surface by holding an atom-sharp tip extremely close and measuring the quantum current that tunnels across the gap.

Classically, electrons in the sample and tip should remain separated by the vacuum barrier. Quantum mechanics gives their wave-like probability a small reach beyond it, creating a tunnelling current that changes steeply with distance. As feedback raises and lowers the tip to keep that current steady, the motion becomes a map of the surface's electronic topography. Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer turned this effect into an instrument at IBM Zurich, earning a share of the 1986 Physics Nobel Prize. Near enough, a forbidden crossing becomes a ruler.

Scanning tunnelling microscopeRead card

Q2004

WonderScience

Electron microscopes use short-wavelength electron beams and electromagnetic lenses to resolve structures far smaller than visible-light microscopy can distinguish.

A light microscope loses resolving power when the details approach the wavelength of its illumination. Electrons also behave as waves, but accelerated electrons can have much shorter wavelengths. Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll used magnetic coils to focus them; their 1931 prototype led to Ruska's 1933 instrument that surpassed optical resolution. Modern transmission instruments send electrons through very thin specimens, while scanning designs read signals from surfaces. The images require vacuum, preparation and interpretation, yet they opened cells, viruses and materials far beyond the frontier of glass lenses.

Electron microscopeRead card

Q2005

WonderScience

Mass spectrometry ionizes a sample, separates the resulting ions by mass-to-charge ratio and records their abundance, producing spectra that can reveal compounds, isotopes and molecular structure.

The instrument is no microscopic weighing pan. An ion source gives atoms or molecules charge; an analyser sorts their paths or flight times; a detector counts what arrives. Some methods preserve large molecules, while others break them into informative fragments. A mass-to-charge value narrows identity but rarely announces it: the peaks become evidence through calibration, chemistry and reference spectra.

Mass spectrometryRead card

Q2008

WonderScience

Photogrammetry finds matching points in overlapping photographs and uses camera geometry and parallax to calculate distance, shape and three-dimensional coordinates.

A feature shifts within an image when the camera moves; that apparent disagreement carries geometric information. With known or recoverable camera positions, software traces corresponding points through several views and triangulates where they sit in space. The result may be a map, a building survey, a terrain model or a record of an object too fragile to touch. Here the camera is a measuring instrument disguised as an image-maker.

PhotogrammetryRead card

Q2009

WonderTechnology

Lidar times the return of laser pulses to build three-dimensional point clouds; pulses reaching ground through canopy gaps can expose subtle terrain and archaeological landscapes hidden by vegetation.

A lidar instrument sends rapid pulses and converts each round-trip travel time into distance. Aircraft or satellites repeat the measurement millions of times, assembling a point cloud of roofs, branches and ground. The light does not pass through solid leaves; enough pulses find small openings for analysts to separate canopy returns from terrain. Remove the digital forest and old roads, terraces or foundations can emerge without a spade entering the soil.

LidarRead card

Q2012

WonderScience

A Kibble balance realises the kilogram by balancing weight against electromagnetic force measured with quantum electrical standards tied to the fixed value of Planck's constant.

The balance works in two linked modes. One matches a mass's weight with magnetic force on a current-carrying coil; the other moves the coil to calibrate the same system through induced voltage. Quantum standards make the electrical measurements traceable to Planck's constant, whose value was fixed in the 2019 SI. A suitably equipped metrology institute can now realise mass from a reproducible recipe instead of comparing everything to one ageing object.

Kibble balanceRead card

Q2013

DriveHistory

In 1823, frontiersman Hugh Glass was mauled by a grizzly bear and abandoned by the two men assigned to bury him. Broken and feverish, he crawled and rafted some 200 miles to Fort Kiowa, living on roots, berries and whatever the prairie left him.

No account from Glass himself survives; the story reached print in 1825, retold by men of the frontier, so the finer details grew in the telling. What the records support is remarkable enough: a man given up for dead who set his own broken leg and travelled for around six weeks to safety. The strangest part, as the story goes, is the ending — when Glass finally faced the men who had left him, he let them live.

Hugh GlassRead card

Q2014

DriveHistory

In 1960–61, thirteen American women pilots passed the same physical screening tests as NASA's first astronauts, in a privately run programme that was cancelled before any of them could fly. Sixty years later, Wally Funk finally reached space at 82.

Dr Randolph Lovelace, who had designed NASA's astronaut medical exams, quietly ran the same tests on accomplished women pilots — and thirteen passed. The programme lost its facilities in 1961, and Congressional hearings the next year changed nothing. The name 'Mercury 13' came from a television producer decades on. When Wally Funk rode a rocket past the edge of space in July 2021, she carried six decades of waiting with her.

Mercury 13Read card

Q2015

DriveArt

When arthritis made embroidery painful, Anna Mary Robertson Moses — Grandma Moses — began painting scenes of farm life in her late seventies. Her first solo show opened in New York when she was 80, and she painted into her 101st year.

Her sister suggested painting might be easier on stiff hands than needlework. It was — and something else came with it. A New York collector spotted her pictures in a drugstore window; the 1940 exhibition was titled 'What a Farm Wife Painted'. She produced more than 1,500 paintings in about two decades, most of them memories of rural seasons, and became one of America's most beloved artists before her death at 101 in 1961.

Grandma MosesRead card

Q2016

DriveArt

In 1772, at 72, Mary Delany noticed how a geranium petal matched a scrap of red paper — and invented the 'paper mosaick'. Over the next decade she cut 985 botanically precise flower collages, each built from hundreds of tiny paper pieces.

'I have invented a new way of imitating flowers,' she wrote that autumn. Botanists including Joseph Banks admired the collages' scientific accuracy; some carry hundreds of paper petals layered on black backgrounds. She worked for about ten years until her eyesight failed in her early eighties. The ten albums she called the Flora Delanica now rest in the British Museum — the life's work of an artist who started at 72.

Mary DelanyRead card

Q2017

DriveArt

Bill Traylor was born into slavery in Alabama around 1853. In 1939, in his mid-eighties and living rough in Montgomery, he picked up a pencil — and in roughly three years produced more than a thousand drawings on scavenged cardboard.

He worked on a sidewalk by day, drawing sharp-edged mules, dogs, dancing figures and memories from plantation life, and slept in the back room of a funeral parlour. A young artist bought him poster paints and saved hundreds of the drawings. Traylor died in 1949, almost unknown. In 2018 the Smithsonian gave him a landmark retrospective — billed as its first for an artist born into slavery.

Bill TraylorRead card

Q2018

DriveHistory

Julia Child could barely cook when she married at 34. She enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris at 37, and after one publisher rejected her manuscript, 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking' appeared in 1961 — when she was 49.

The book was written with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle over nearly a decade. Houghton Mifflin turned it down, reasoning that Americans wanted something quick from a mix; Knopf took the risk. Child was 51 when her television programme began, waving knives and dropping food with cheerful honesty. The lesson she embodied was simple: appetite for learning matters more than an early start.

Julia ChildRead card

Next reading modeStillnessIdeas for rest and attention.