Wonder: The world is stranger up close. - Page 53

Editor’s note

The open room

Wonder begins where familiarity loosens. This edition crosses science, art, language and history to recover the useful shock of looking closely at things we thought we already knew.

Q1970

WonderScience

The Great Trigonometrical Survey used baselines and triangulation across India, producing geodetic measurements that identified Peak XV as the world's highest known summit.

Beginning in 1802, survey teams carried precision instruments through heat, monsoon and mountain terrain. Peak XV was observed from distant stations on the northern plains, then its height was corrected for Earth's curvature, atmospheric refraction and the instruments themselves. The calculations identified the highest known summit without an ascent. The same survey also served the East India Company's colonial administration, turning terrain into both knowledge and control.

Great Trigonometrical SurveyRead card

Q1971

WonderScience

Marie Tharp transformed shipboard depth soundings into seafloor profiles, revealing the Mid-Atlantic Ridge's central rift valley and powerful evidence for plate tectonics.

Because women were barred from many research cruises, Tharp worked ashore with rows of echo-sounding numbers collected at sea. Her profiles exposed a rift through the Atlantic ridge; Bruce Heezen initially dismissed the tectonic implication, then the earthquake evidence confirmed it. By turning scattered measurements into landscape, she helped a moving planet become impossible to ignore.

Marie TharpRead card

Q1972

WonderScience

Inge Lehmann's 1936 analysis of earthquake waves showed that Earth's core contains a solid inner core inside its liquid outer region.

Seismologists expected certain earthquake waves to vanish in the shadow made by Earth's liquid core, yet instruments recorded weak arrivals there. Lehmann proposed that waves were refracting and reflecting from another boundary deep inside. She never saw the inner core; she inferred it from a disciplined reading of what should not have arrived, but did.

Inge LehmannRead card

Q1973

WonderClimate

In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote reported that a cylinder rich in carbon dioxide heated more strongly in sunlight and stayed warm longer than ordinary air.

Foote compared gases in paired cylinders fitted with thermometers, set them in sunlight and recorded their temperatures. She reasoned that an atmosphere with more carbon dioxide would give Earth a higher temperature. Joseph Henry presented her paper at a scientific meeting rather than Foote herself. Her apparatus did not isolate the infrared mechanism later measured by John Tyndall, but her conclusion that more atmospheric carbon dioxide could mean a warmer Earth was strikingly prescient.

Eunice Newton FooteRead card

Q1974

DriveSpace

As NASA's first Chief of Astronomy, Nancy Grace Roman built the agency's space-astronomy programme and became a decisive advocate for the telescope later named Hubble.

Roman entered NASA in 1959, when astronomy above the atmosphere was still an institutional possibility rather than a mature programme. She coordinated researchers, priorities and funding for orbital observatories, and steadily advanced the case for a large space telescope. Discovery depends on optics and equations, but also on the person who can keep an audacious instrument alive through years of meetings.

Nancy RomanRead card

Q1975

WonderSpace

Beatrice Tinsley built quantitative models of how stellar populations make galaxies change colour and brightness as they age, reshaping observational cosmology.

To look at a distant galaxy is to look backward in time, but comparing galaxies requires knowing how their own stars evolve. Tinsley's models followed successive generations of stars, gas and heavy elements, showing that a galaxy's light changes with age. Cosmologists could no longer treat galaxies as unchanging markers scattered through space; every marker carried an evolving past inside it.

Beatrice TinsleyRead card

Q1976

WonderScience

Chien-Shiung Wu's cobalt-60 experiment showed that weak nuclear interactions violate parity: nature can distinguish a process from its mirror image.

Wu's team aligned radioactive cobalt nuclei at extremely low temperature and counted the electrons emitted during beta decay. They emerged preferentially opposite the nuclear spin, not symmetrically as parity conservation required. The 1957 result confirmed a radical proposal by Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang. That year's Nobel Prize recognised their theoretical breakthrough but did not include Wu or her experimental collaborators.

Chien-Shiung WuRead card

Q1977

WonderScience

Noether's theorem connects each differentiable continuous symmetry of a system's action with a conserved quantity, linking time translation to energy and spatial translation to momentum.

If an experiment's laws do not change when it is performed tomorrow rather than today, energy is conserved; if they do not care where it happens, momentum is conserved. Emmy Noether proved the general bridge between such continuous symmetries and conserved quantities in 1918. A theorem born in abstract mathematics became part of the grammar of modern physics.

Emmy NoetherRead card

Q1978

DriveScience

Excluded from formal study, Sophie Germain used the name Monsieur LeBlanc to exchange mathematics with leading scholars and later won the Paris Academy's elasticity prize.

Germain obtained lecture notes from the École Polytechnique although women could not enrol, submitting work under a former male student's name. Lagrange sought out the anonymous talent and became an ally. Her number theory advanced a major case of Fermat's Last Theorem; her work on vibrating plates survived repeated rejection to win the Academy's 1816 prize.

Sophie GermainRead card

Q1979

WonderScience

Émilie du Châtelet's French Principia did more than translate Newton: its extensive commentary clarified his physics and remains the standard complete French edition.

Du Châtelet translated Newton's dense Latin into French, checked the mathematics and added substantial explanations and commentary, completing the project near the end of her life. She also defended vis viva as proportional to mass times velocity squared, a precursor of kinetic energy. Translation in her hands was neither clerical nor secondary; it was a form of exacting scientific authorship.

Émilie du ChâteletRead card

Q1980

WonderScience

Mary Somerville's 1834 synthesis On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences linked astronomy, physics, chemistry and geology for a broad reading public.

Somerville did not dilute difficult knowledge; she revealed its connections. Her book moved from celestial mechanics to light, electricity, magnetism and the Earth, showing how discoveries in one domain changed questions in another. In reviewing it, William Whewell coined the word scientist. The new noun followed a book that had already demonstrated the unity it needed to name.

Mary SomervilleRead card

Q1981

WonderArt

Maria Sibylla Merian depicted insect metamorphosis together with the plants each species lived on, joining close observation, ecology and art.

Natural-history plates often arranged dead specimens as isolated types. Merian raised caterpillars, watched them pupate and painted egg, larva, pupa and adult around the host plant that fed them. In Suriname she also relied on enslaved African and Indigenous people as guides, household workers and sources of botanical knowledge—contributors her published plates did not name. Her compositions made transformation inseparable from habitat, anticipating an ecological way of seeing.

Maria Sibylla MerianRead card

Q1982

WonderSpace

Qing-era scholar Wang Zhenyi used a round table, crystal lamp and mirror to demonstrate how the Sun, Earth and Moon align during eclipses.

Wang lived only twenty-nine years, yet wrote on astronomy, mathematics and the education of women. To explain lunar eclipses, she used a round table as Earth, hung a crystal lamp as the Sun and placed a round mirror as the Moon. By arranging the three according to astronomical principles, she turned celestial geometry into a demonstration another observer could reproduce with ordinary things.

Wang Zhenyi (astronomer)Read card

Q1983

WonderBiology

Janaki Ammal used cytogenetics and hybridization to help breed sugarcane suited to Indian conditions, while advancing the study of chromosome numbers in cultivated plants.

India once relied heavily on imported sugar despite growing extensive cane, because many local plants had lower sugar content. At Coimbatore, Ammal studied wild and cultivated relatives and used their chromosome patterns to guide crosses adapted to the climate. Her later atlas with C. D. Darlington turned chromosome counts into a reference map for plant breeding around the world.

Janaki AmmalRead card

Q1984

DriveHealth

Alice Ball isolated injectable ethyl esters from chaulmoogra oil, creating the most effective treatment available for Hansen's disease before antibiotics.

Chaulmoogra oil had long been used against leprosy, but swallowed doses caused nausea and raw injections were poorly absorbed. Working at the University of Hawaiʻi, Ball separated and modified its fatty acids into a form doctors could inject. She died at twenty-four before publishing; the method was promoted under another man's name until her authorship was recovered.

Alice BallRead card

Q1985

WonderScience

Gladys West's satellite-data calculations refined mathematical models of Earth's shape, work that became foundational to the accuracy of GPS.

At the U.S. Navy's Dahlgren laboratory, West programmed computers to process satellite observations and helped refine the geoid, reference ellipsoid and satellite-orbit models. The geoid follows a gravity-shaped mean sea level; the ellipsoid supplies a clean mathematical reference; orbit calculations locate spacecraft relative to Earth. Together, those geodetic frameworks helped make satellite positioning accurate. Decades before a phone could locate itself, her calculations gave satellites a more exact planet to work from.

Gladys WestRead card

Q1987

DriveBiography

Mary Jackson petitioned the City of Hampton to attend graduate courses held at a segregated white school, then became NASA's first Black woman engineer in 1958.

Jackson entered Langley's segregated West Area Computing unit in 1951, then moved into experiments in a supersonic pressure tunnel. Her training route required after-hours mathematics and physics classes in a school she was legally barred from attending without special approval. She went on to publish research on airflow and boundary layers at supersonic speeds. Later, she accepted a lower grade to manage equal-opportunity programmes, trading personal rank for the power to widen other people's routes upward.

Mary JacksonRead card

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 toward 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 Center 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

Move into another roomDriveFor the next attempt.