Biography: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 2

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StillnessBiography

Neşet Ertaş (1938–2012) was one of Turkey's best-loved folk musicians. From his father, Muharrem Ertaş, he learned the bozlak, a long, high-pitched and often mournful song of Central Anatolia, and he renewed it with songs of his own.

Ertaş was born in 1938 in a village in Kırşehir, into an Abdal family. The Abdals are a Central Anatolian community in which music has long been a hereditary trade, played at weddings and gatherings. As a child he travelled from village to village with his father, playing the bağlama, a long-necked lute. In 1976 a stroke left him unable to play; he went to Germany for treatment in 1979, stayed for 24 years and gave concerts for Turkish migrants across Europe. In 2002 he declined the title of State Artist, saying that all artists already served the state and a separate title felt like discrimination. He received an honorary doctorate from Istanbul Technical University in 2011 and died in İzmir in 2012.

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WonderBiography

Peruvian singer Yma Sumac had an exceptionally wide vocal range, reaching from deep low notes to very high ones. In the 1950s her recordings, set in lavish orchestral arrangements, made her an international star.

Sumac was born in Peru in 1922 as Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo. Her first album for Capitol Records, Voice of the Xtabay (1950), made with the composer Les Baxter, set Andean-inspired songs in lush Hollywood orchestration and sold in huge numbers. Publicity presented her as an Inca princess, and a baseless rumour claimed she was really a Brooklyn housewife called Amy Camus, her name spelled backwards. Estimates of her range run from about four and a half to nearly five octaves; the composer and critic Virgil Thomson put it very close to five. In 1960 she began a tour of the Soviet Union that lasted more than six months. She died in Los Angeles in 2008.

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StillnessBiography

Liliʻuokalani, the last monarch of Hawaiʻi, was also a prolific songwriter. Imprisoned in ʻIolani Palace in 1895, she wrote Kuʻu Pua i Paoakalani about the flowers a supporter brought her from her garden, wrapped in the newspapers she was forbidden to read.

Liliʻuokalani came to the throne in 1891. In January 1893 a group of American and European businessmen, backed by US troops, overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom. After a failed rising to restore her in 1895, she was arrested, forced to abdicate and held in an upstairs room of ʻIolani Palace for about eight months. Denied political news, she followed events through the newspapers wrapped around the flowers. She wrote more than 150 songs in all, including He Mele Lāhui Hawaiʻi, the kingdom's national anthem from 1866 to 1876, and Aloha ʻOe (1878), still one of Hawaiʻi's best-known songs. The United States annexed Hawaiʻi in 1898.

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DriveArt

Faith Ringgold was an American artist who painted on fabric and stitched it into quilts, with handwritten stories around the image. Her story quilts put Black family life, history and dreams of freedom at the centre.

Ringgold was born in Harlem, New York, in 1930 and first became known in the 1960s for paintings about the civil rights movement. She began her story quilts around 1980; the first, Echoes of Harlem, was made with her mother, the fashion designer Willi Posey, who had grown up with the African American quilting tradition. The best known, Tar Beach (1988), shows a girl named Cassie dreaming that she flies over the George Washington Bridge from her family's rooftop; 'tar beach' was the name for the tarred roofs where Harlem families went on hot summer nights. The text around the scene tells the story in Cassie's voice. Ringgold turned it into a picture book in 1991, which won a Caldecott Honor and the Coretta Scott King Award for illustration. She died in 2024, aged 93.

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WonderArt

Etel Adnan was a Lebanese-American poet and painter whose work ranged across poetry, essays, painting, tapestry and fold-out books. She lived between Beirut, Paris and California, and Mount Tamalpais near San Francisco became one of her lifelong subjects.

Adnan was born in Beirut in 1925 to a Muslim father from Damascus and a Greek Christian mother from Smyrna, today's İzmir. She studied philosophy in Paris and the United States and taught at a college in San Rafael, California, where she began painting in the late 1950s. Mount Tamalpais, which she could see from her home in Sausalito, appears in many of her small canvases of bold colour blocks, and her 1986 book Journey to Mount Tamalpais describes that attachment. As a writer she opposed the Vietnam War in her poetry and wrote Sitt Marie Rose (1978), a novel set in the Lebanese Civil War. Wide recognition as a painter came late, after the Documenta exhibition of 2012. She died in Paris in 2021, aged 96.

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DriveArt

Semiha Berksoy was Türkiye's first woman opera singer, and over seventy years she also acted on stage and screen, wrote and painted. Her paintings bring self-portraits, stage roles and memories together in a dramatic world of their own.

Berksoy was born in Istanbul in 1910; her mother was a painter, and she studied theatre, music and painting in the city. In 1931 she acted in İstanbul Sokaklarında, the first Turkish sound film. In 1934 she sang in Özsoy, composed by Ahmet Adnan Saygun at Atatürk's request and regarded as the first Turkish opera, at a performance in Ankara for the visiting Shah of Iran. In 1939 she sang the title role of Ariadne auf Naxos in Berlin during celebrations of Richard Strauss's 75th birthday, becoming the first Turkish opera singer to perform on a European stage. Her paintings, on canvas, cardboard or fabric, show frontal figures, often herself, surrounded by written names, dates, stage curtains and people from her life. She was named a State Artist in 1998 and died in 2004.

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DriveArt

Füreya Koral was one of the pioneers of modern studio ceramics in Türkiye. Besides vessels and sculptures, she made large ceramic wall panels for hotels, universities and other public buildings, bringing clay into spaces people use every day.

Koral was born in Istanbul in 1910 into a family of artists and writers: the painters Fahrelnissa Zeid and Aliye Berger were her mother's sisters, and the writer Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı, known as the Fisherman of Halicarnassus, was her mother's brother. She turned to ceramics while being treated for tuberculosis in a Swiss sanatorium in the late 1940s, took a ceramics course in Lausanne in 1949 and held her first solo exhibition in Paris in 1951. In 1953 she opened a studio in the Harbiye district of Istanbul, which became a meeting place for artists. Her panels include work for the Marmara Hotel at Atatürk Forest Farm in Ankara (1959) and for Hacettepe University's Faculty of Medicine (1965). She died in 1997.

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StillnessArt

Ara Güler was the photojournalist who recorded twentieth-century Istanbul through its people. His pictures of fishers, workers, children, ferries, back streets and changing neighbourhoods show the city as a place where people lived, not as a postcard view.

Güler was born in Istanbul in 1928 and started as a photojournalist at the newspaper Yeni İstanbul in 1950. In 1958 he became the first Near East correspondent for the American publisher Time-Life, and his work appeared in magazines such as Paris Match, Stern and The Sunday Times. Henri Cartier-Bresson and Marc Riboud, whom he met in the 1950s, brought him into the Magnum Photos agency in the early 1960s. He called himself a photojournalist and visual historian rather than an artist, and he became known as 'the Eye of Istanbul'. He photographed figures such as Picasso, Dalí, Churchill and Hitchcock, and his pictures helped introduce the ancient city of Aphrodisias to the world. He died in 2018, leaving a vast archive.

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WonderScience

Marie Tharp, an American geologist, drew the first detailed maps of the Atlantic seafloor from ships' depth readings. In the early 1950s she found a deep valley running along the middle of the undersea Mid-Atlantic Ridge, strong evidence that the seafloor is spreading apart.

Tharp joined Columbia University's Lamont Geological Observatory in New York in 1948. Women were not allowed to work on its research ships, so for nearly two decades her colleague Bruce Heezen collected echo-sounder depth readings at sea while she turned them into profiles and maps ashore. In 1952 she spotted a V-shaped valley along the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, an undersea mountain chain longer than any range on land, and read it as a rift where the seafloor is pulling apart. Heezen at first dismissed it as 'girl talk', because it supported continental drift, then a controversial idea. He changed his mind when a separate map of undersea earthquakes lined up with her valley. With the Austrian painter Heinrich Berann, they published The World Ocean Floor map in 1977.

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WonderScience

In 1936 the Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann used earthquake waves to show that the Earth's core has two parts: a solid inner core inside a liquid outer core.

Lehmann, a seismologist (a scientist who studies earthquakes and the waves they send through the Earth), headed the seismology department of Denmark's Geodetic Institute from 1928. Scientists then thought the core was a single ball of molten metal, which should bend certain waves away and leave a 'shadow zone' on the far side of the planet where they could not arrive. Studying records of a large 1929 earthquake in New Zealand, she noticed strong waves reaching stations in Russia that lay inside that zone. Her explanation was a smaller, solid core at the centre that reflects the waves. Leading seismologists accepted it within a few years, and computer calculations confirmed it in 1971. The inner core stays solid, despite temperatures similar to the Sun's surface, because of the enormous pressure. Lehmann died in 1993, aged 104.

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WonderClimate

In 1856 the American scientist and women's rights campaigner Eunice Newton Foote showed that a glass cylinder of carbon dioxide grew hotter in sunlight than one of ordinary air, and took longer to cool. She suggested that more of this gas in the air would warm the Earth.

Foote was an amateur scientist living in Seneca Falls, New York. In 1848 she signed the Declaration of Sentiments at the Seneca Falls Convention, the first meeting devoted to women's rights, and helped prepare its proceedings for publication. For her experiment she used an air pump, two glass cylinders and four thermometers, and compared dry air, moist air, carbon dioxide and hydrogen in sunshine and in shade. Her paper was read at the August 1856 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science by Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution; why she did not present it herself is unclear. Three years later John Tyndall measured how gases absorb infrared heat, the mechanism behind the greenhouse effect, and he received the credit. Foote's paper was largely forgotten until the 21st century.

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DriveSpace

Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first Chief of Astronomy, built the agency's space astronomy programme in the 1960s and spent years winning support for the telescope later named Hubble.

Roman, an astronomer who had studied the motions of stars, joined NASA in 1959 and became the first woman in an executive post at the agency. She ran its early orbiting observatories and, once they worked, began arguing for a large telescope above the atmosphere, which blurs and blocks much of the light from space. In 1971 she set up a steering group of astronomers and engineers to define what the telescope had to do, then spent the 1970s building support and writing testimony for Congress. She also backed investment in electronic light detectors, and Hubble became the first major observatory to use CCDs, the kind of sensor later found in digital cameras. She retired in 1979; Hubble was launched in 1990, and she is often called the 'Mother of Hubble'. In 2020 NASA named a new space telescope after her.

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WonderSpace

Beatrice Tinsley, a New Zealand astronomer, showed in the late 1960s and 1970s that galaxies change colour and brightness as their stars age. Her computer models changed how astronomers read the light of distant galaxies.

Tinsley was born in Chester, England, in 1941 and grew up in New Zealand. After she married a fellow physics student, university rules kept her from working where he was employed, and in 1963 she followed him to Dallas. She earned her doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin in 1967, as the only woman in its astronomy programme. Her key point was that we see a distant galaxy as it was long ago, when its stars were younger, so it would look different even if nothing else had changed. Astronomers had to allow for this before using galaxies to measure the universe. Despite her influence, she found no permanent post until Yale hired her in 1974; in 1978 she became its first woman professor of astronomy. She died of melanoma, a skin cancer, in 1981, aged 40.

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WonderScience

In 1956 the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu showed that some nuclear processes do not behave the same way as their mirror image. Her experiment with radioactive cobalt-60 overturned 'parity conservation', a rule physicists had long taken for granted.

Physicists had long assumed that the laws of nature work the same way in a mirror image, a principle called parity conservation. In 1956 the theorists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang pointed out that nobody had tested this for the weak nuclear force, which drives beta decay, a kind of radioactivity in which a nucleus gives off an electron. Wu, a leading expert on beta decay at Columbia University, cooled cobalt-60 to near absolute zero at the National Bureau of Standards and lined up its nuclei with a magnetic field. The electrons came out mostly in one direction, so the mirror version of the experiment would give a different result. Lee and Yang won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics; Wu was left out, although she received the first Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978.

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WonderScience

Emmy Noether proved in 1918 that symmetries in the laws of physics are tied to quantities that stay constant. Because the laws are the same from one moment to the next, energy is conserved; because they are the same in every place, momentum is conserved.

Noether earned her doctorate at Erlangen in 1907 and then taught there for seven years without pay, as women could not hold university posts. In 1915 David Hilbert and Felix Klein brought her to Göttingen, where the faculty resisted her appointment and she lectured for four years under Hilbert's name. Hilbert and Klein were puzzling over how energy behaves in Einstein's new theory of gravity, and her 1918 paper answered them, giving physics what is now called Noether's theorem. She became a lecturer in 1919 and went on to help found modern abstract algebra. Dismissed by the Nazi government in 1933 because she was Jewish, she moved to Bryn Mawr College in the United States and died after surgery in 1935, aged 53. Einstein wrote that she was the most significant creative mathematical genius since women's higher education began.

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DriveScience

Sophie Germain could not study at France's École Polytechnique because she was a woman, so she sent her mathematics to leading scholars under the name Monsieur LeBlanc. In 1816 she became the first woman to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences.

Germain taught herself mathematics from her father's library during the French Revolution. In 1794 she obtained lecture notes from the new École Polytechnique and sent her work to Joseph-Louis Lagrange under the name of a former student; impressed, he sought her out and became her mentor. Writing to Carl Friedrich Gauss as LeBlanc, she made progress on Fermat's Last Theorem, the claim that no positive whole numbers a, b and c satisfy aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ when n is greater than 2. Primes p for which 2p + 1 is also prime are still called Sophie Germain primes. Her prize-winning work explained how elastic plates vibrate, after unsuccessful entries in 1811 and 1813. She died of breast cancer in 1831; Gauss had recommended her for an honorary degree from Göttingen, but it was never awarded.

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WonderScience

Émilie du Châtelet, an 18th-century French mathematician, translated Isaac Newton's Principia from Latin into French and added a long commentary explaining his physics. Published after her death, it is still the standard French translation.

The Principia, published in 1687, is the book in which Newton set out his laws of motion and gravity, in Latin. Du Châtelet read Latin, Italian, Greek and German from childhood. From the mid-1730s she lived and worked with the writer Voltaire at Cirey, her husband's château in north-eastern France, where the two studied Newton together. In 1740 she published her own book on physics, Institutions de Physique. She took part in the debate over vis viva, or 'living force', supporting the view that a moving body's force depends on its mass times the square of its speed, close to today's idea of kinetic energy. She began the Principia translation in 1745 and worked on it intensely while pregnant, finishing shortly before she died in September 1749, days after giving birth, aged 42. It appeared in 1756, and in full in 1759.

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WonderScience

Mary Somerville's 1834 book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences explained to general readers how astronomy, physics, chemistry and geology fit together. A review of it gave English the word 'scientist'.

Somerville was born in Scotland in 1780 and had only about a year of formal schooling. She taught herself algebra and geometry against her family's wishes, and her second husband, William Somerville, encouraged her studies. Her 1831 book The Mechanism of the Heavens, which explained the French mathematician Laplace's work on the movements of the planets, made her famous. Reviewing her 1834 book, the Cambridge scholar William Whewell noted that English had no general word for people who study the sciences, and suggested 'scientist', on the model of 'artist'. In 1835 she and Caroline Herschel became the first women elected honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society. Somerville College, Oxford, is named after her, and her portrait appears on the Royal Bank of Scotland's £10 note issued in 2017.

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WonderArt

Maria Sibylla Merian, a German-born artist and naturalist, painted each stage of an insect's life, from egg to caterpillar to butterfly, on the plant it fed on. Her 1705 book on the insects of Suriname joined close observation with art.

Merian was born in Frankfurt in 1647 into a family of engravers and was raising silkworms by the age of 13. In 1679 she published the first volume of a book showing how caterpillars transform. Many people then believed insects were born from mud or rotting matter, and illustrators usually drew dead specimens in tidy rows; her careful drawings of each life stage helped show that insects follow a fixed life cycle. In 1699, aged 52, she sold 255 of her own paintings to fund a voyage to the Dutch colony of Suriname with her daughter Dorothea. For nearly two years she collected and raised insects there, relying on enslaved Africans and Indigenous people for help and knowledge, until illness, possibly malaria, sent her home. Her Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705) became a landmark of natural history.

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WonderSpace

Wang Zhenyi, an 18th-century Chinese scholar, explained lunar eclipses with a round table as the Earth, a hanging crystal lamp as the Sun and a round mirror as the Moon. Moving them showed how the three line up.

Wang lived from 1768 to 1797 in Qing-dynasty China, where women were rarely allowed to study astronomy. She learned from her grandfather's large library and from her family, and taught herself most of her mathematics and astronomy. She argued that the Earth is round, against the old idea of a flat Earth under a round sky, wrote on the slow shift of the equinoxes, and rewrote the mathematician Mei Wending's difficult Principles of Calculation in simpler language for beginners. Only about ten of her scientific papers survive, partly because much of her work was destroyed during her final illness; she died at 29. She also left 13 volumes of poetry and prose, and wrote that women and men have the same reason to study. A crater on Venus is named after her.

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WonderBiology

The Indian botanist Janaki Ammal studied plant chromosomes and used that knowledge to help breed sweeter sugarcane suited to India's climate. In 1945 she co-wrote the Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants, a reference to the chromosome counts of crops and garden plants.

Chromosomes are the thread-like structures in a cell that carry its genes, and their number helps explain which plants can be crossed. Janaki Ammal earned her PhD at the University of Michigan in 1931, rare for an Indian woman at the time. India then imported its sweetest sugarcane from Southeast Asia; at the Sugarcane Breeding Station in Coimbatore she crossed cane with related grasses to produce sweet varieties that grew well in India. In England she worked with the geneticist C. D. Darlington at the John Innes Institute, her co-author on the atlas, and then at the Royal Horticultural Society's garden at Wisley, where she treated magnolias with the chemical colchicine. A white-flowered magnolia there is named 'Janaki Ammal'. The Indian government later invited her home to reorganise the Botanical Survey of India, and she received the Padma Shri in 1977.

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DriveHealth

Alice Ball, a 23-year-old chemist in Hawaii, found in 1915 how to turn chaulmoogra oil, a traditional remedy, into an injectable medicine for leprosy, also called Hansen's disease. Her method was the most effective treatment until the 1940s.

Oil from the seeds of the chaulmoogra tree had long been used against leprosy in India and elsewhere in Asia, but it was hard to take: swallowed, it caused nausea, and injected, it formed painful blisters under the skin. Ball, the first woman and first Black American to earn a master's degree at the College of Hawaii, took up the problem at the request of the surgeon Harry Hollmann. She turned the oil's fatty acids into ethyl esters, a form that could be injected and absorbed by the body. She died in December 1916, aged 24, before she could publish. The college president, Arthur Dean, carried on the work without crediting her; Hollmann later published an account naming it the 'Ball method'. Dapsone and related drugs replaced it in the 1940s.

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WonderScience

Gladys West, a mathematician at a US Navy laboratory, programmed computers to build ever more accurate models of the Earth's true shape from satellite data. That work helped lay the groundwork for satellite navigation systems such as GPS.

West grew up on her family's farm in rural Virginia and won a scholarship to Virginia State College. In 1956 she was hired as a mathematician at the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia, where she stayed for 42 years. The Earth is not a perfect sphere: it bulges at the equator, and its gravity varies from place to place. Scientists describe its true shape with the geoid, the surface the oceans would take under gravity alone, and positions and heights are measured against it. From the mid-1970s West programmed an IBM Stretch computer to calculate this shape ever more precisely, using data from satellites such as Seasat, whose radar altimetry project she managed, and Geosat. Her role became widely known only in 2018, when she was inducted into the US Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame.

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DriveSpace

Dorothy Vaughan led the West Area Computers, a segregated group of Black women mathematicians at NACA, NASA's predecessor, and in 1949 became its first Black supervisor. When electronic computers arrived, she taught herself and her staff the programming language FORTRAN.

Vaughan was a mathematics teacher when she joined the Langley laboratory in Virginia in 1943, during the Second World War, as a 'human computer', someone who did engineers' calculations by hand. Under Virginia's segregation laws, the Black women of West Area Computing worked, ate and used bathrooms apart from their white colleagues. In 1949 she became acting head of the unit, the first Black supervisor at NACA. When NASA replaced NACA in 1958, the segregated unit was abolished and she joined the new Analysis and Computation Division, where she became an expert FORTRAN programmer and worked on the Scout rocket, which launched small satellites. She retired in 1971. Her story reached a wide audience through Margot Lee Shetterly's 2016 book Hidden Figures and the film based on it.

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