Wonder: Ideas for closer looking. - Page 50

Editor’s note

Wonder

Selected for evidence, scale, close looking and clear explanations of unfamiliar subjects.

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

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

Q1998

WonderBiography

Ernest Everett Just revealed decisive changes at the egg-cell surface during fertilisation and insisted that living cells be studied in conditions faithful to their environment.

At the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Just became an authority on keeping marine invertebrate eggs alive and experimentally trustworthy. He showed that sperm entry helps determine the first cleavage plane and studied the surface reactions that prevent additional sperm from entering an egg. His 1939 book The Biology of the Cell Surface gathered a lifetime's argument: a cell is not merely its isolated parts, but an active boundary responding to a whole environment. Precision began with respecting what kept the specimen alive.

Ernest Everett JustRead 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

Q2001

WonderScience

In a cloud chamber, ions left by a charged particle seed droplets in supersaturated vapour, turning an invisible passage into a bright, photographable track.

Charles Wilson began by studying how clouds form. Rapid expansion cooled moist air in his chamber until its vapour was ready to condense; a charged particle supplied a thread of ions on which droplets gathered. Magnetic fields bent the particles' paths; the resulting curved tracks let physicists infer charge and momentum from geometry. Cloud-chamber photographs helped reveal cosmic-ray events and the positron. The instrument did not photograph the particle itself. It photographed the atmosphere's exquisitely brief reply.

Cloud chamberRead 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

Q2003

WonderScience

An atomic force microscope follows a surface with a tip on a tiny cantilever, translating minute forces and deflections into a three-dimensional nanoscale map.

Scanning tunnelling microscopy depended on an electrical current and therefore favoured conducting samples. In 1986 Gerd Binnig, Calvin Quate and Christoph Gerber proposed a different messenger: force. Their microscopic tip can touch a surface or hover just above it while attraction and repulsion bend the cantilever; a laser commonly magnifies that motion for the detector. Because the method can work on insulators and in liquids as well as in vacuum, it brought polymers, membranes and biological structures into the nanoscale landscape. Seeing became a disciplined form of touch.

Atomic force microscopyRead 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

Q2006

WonderArt

Late nineteenth-century chronophotography recorded successive phases of movement in image sequences or on one plate, making animal and human locomotion available for measurement.

Eadweard Muybridge used rows of cameras to separate a horse's stride into instants; Étienne-Jules Marey developed methods that layered regular exposures from one viewpoint, turning motion into trace and interval. The images corrected assumptions hidden in paintings, opened new study of bodies and supplied early cinema with part of its visual grammar. Before film made pictures move, photography made movement pause long enough to think.

ChronophotographyRead card

Q2007

WonderArt

Introduced commercially in 1907, Autochrome Lumière used a microscopic mosaic of dyed potato-starch grains over a photographic emulsion to record colour on glass.

The Lumière process spread millions of tiny red-orange, green and blue-violet starch grains across a glass plate, filling the gaps with lampblack and coating the screen with light-sensitive emulsion. After reversal processing, the finished transparency needed transmitted light to glow. Long exposures softened movement and the irregular mosaic lent images a pointillist atmosphere: modern colour arriving through an unexpectedly edible material.

Autochrome LumièreRead 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

Q2010

WonderBiology

Environmental DNA surveys detect genetic traces shed into water, soil or air, allowing researchers to look for species without seeing or capturing the organisms themselves.

Organisms release cells, scales, mucus, pollen, waste and other traces into their surroundings. Researchers filter a sample, extract its DNA and test a marker for one target species or amplify and sequence markers shared across a community. The method can find rare or elusive life with less disturbance, but a positive signal is not a headcount: DNA travels, decays and can be contaminated. Absence and presence still require ecological judgement.

Environmental DNARead card

Q2011

WonderOcean

Thousands of autonomous Argo floats repeatedly descend and rise through the ocean, measuring temperature, salinity and pressure before surfacing to transmit open data by satellite.

A typical Core Argo float drifts deep for days, sinks towards about 2,000 metres, then profiles the water as it rises. At the surface it sends measurements and position to satellites before diving again, usually completing a cycle in roughly ten days. Distributed across the world's oceans, the fleet has turned vast, rarely visited water into a continuously renewed climate record available to everyone.

Argo (oceanography)Read 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

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