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**'She is an Astronomer': What field of astronomy do you work in?**
 * __ **SHUHUA YE** __
 * Shuhua Ye:** I work in Astrometry and Radio Astronomy.


 * SIAA: How long is it since you got your maximum academic degree?**
 * SY:** 59 years, since 1949.


 * SIAA: What senior positions have you achieved?**
 * SY:** I am a Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, elected in 1980. I was Director of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, CAS, from 1981 to 1993 and Vice-President of the IAU from1988 to 1994. I have been Honorary President of the Chinese Astronomical Society since 1988. I was also President of the Shanghai Association of Science and Technology from 1996 to 2001and Vice president of the Chinese Association of Science and Technology from1991 to 2001.

**SY:** Yes, very few women have got senior positions (only about 10%); for junior position, there are 30%. **SY:** My husband and son are professors in other universities. **SY:** No.
 * SIAA: Do you feel it was more difficult for you to get a job or promotion in comparison with male astronomers?**
 * SY:** Almost no difference between male and female.
 * SIAA: Are women under-represented in your institution? **
 * SIAA: What is your family status? **
 * SIAA: Have you had career breaks? **


 * SIAA: How many hours per day do you normally dedicate to work?**
 * SY:** 8 hours.


 * SIAA: What recommendations would you make to young women starting their career in astronomy?**
 * SY:** In China, the ratio of female to male students in universities is 40% and the ratio of females in graduate schools is 25-30%. As astronomy is becoming more popular than before, I do believe we will have more women astronomers in the younger generation. Yes, they have to work harder, and they have more burdens in family responsibility, and less chance for promotion in work at present, but the situation is improving. We are very happy to have, right now, a female astronomer as the president of the IAU and more women taking place as national leaders too.

Copyright © 2012 She is an Astronomer. All Rights Reserved. [|Joomla!] is Free Software released under the [|GNU/GPL License] Beatrice Tinsley (1941-1981)

Beatrice was born in Chester and had an older sister. After the war, she moved with her family tp New Zealand, and excelled in school in a number of fields, from maths to languages, writing and music. At the age of 14, she decided she wanted to become an astrophysicist. She won a junior scholarship to study chemistry, maths and physics at Cantebury University, and graduated with Master of Science with First Class Honours in Physics in 1961. She married fellow physicsit Brian Tinsely in the same year, and moved to Dallas, Texas when Brian was offered a job at the South West Centre for Advanced Studies. Unable to find a job in Dallas, Beatrice took a part time teaching job at the University of Texas at Austin, some 200 miles away. She enrolled for a Ph.D at Austin in 1964 and completed it in 1966, taking about a third of the time it takes most people to do a Ph.D thesis. In her papers she received marks of 99% and 100%, the first student in the department to achieve marks of over 80%. Before Beatrice began her research, little was known about life cycles of galaxies and the stars within them. She pioneered the study of interacting galaxies and the idea that galaxies change over short timescales compared with age of the Universe, which inspired astronomers to study distant galaxies for clues to galaxy evolution. In particular Beatrice studied how different groups of stars age and what observable effects those changes have on a galaxy. Her work was significant in determining the size of the Universe and its rate of expansion. It was also assumed that galaxies of the same type - spiral, elliptical or lenticular - would be a similar size, shape and luminosity. By comparing the size and luminosity of distant galaxies to nearby galaxies whose distance was already known, it was thought that an accurate distance could be obtained. But her thesis, "Evolution //of Galaxies and its Significance for Cosmology//" showed that determining distances based on morphology alone was unreliable. Factors such as the abundances of chemical elements, the mass of the galaxy and the rate of starbirth were all important parameters in determining the distance and age of the galaxy and, by inference, the size and age of the universe. Tinsley's work formed the basis for contemporary studies of galactic evolution. She also contributed to research to find out whether the universe is an open or closed system. Her work was so important that she received the Annie Cannon Award in Astronomy in 1974. Yet professional recognition was still unforthcoming in Texas. Although she was asked to design an astronomy department for the University of Texas, and in spite of her academic acheivements, her application for a job as head of the university’s astronomy department was not even answered. Knowing she would never be accepted seriously in Texas, Beatrice made the tough decision to seek divorce from her husband in 1974, and persue her scientific career at Santa Cruz, where she took a one year fellowship at the Lick Observatory. The following year she began work as the assistant Professor of Astronomy at Yale and in 1978 became Professor of Astronomy. In the same year she was diagnosed with cancer, but continued to research and publish papers until her death in 1981. Over her short 14 year academic career, as Professor Tinsely, she authored or co-authored around 100 scientific papers on the evolution of galaxies. In 1986 the American Astronomical Society established the Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize for outstanding creative contributions to astronomy or astrophysics, and even the University of Texas at Austin created the Beatrice M Tinsley Visiting Professorship in astronomy in her honour. The asteroid 3087 Beatrice Tinsley is also named after her. ||

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 * Annie Cannon (1863 - 1941)

Annie Jump Cannon was the eldest of three daughters to shipbuilder and state senator Wilson Cannon, and his second wife Mary Jump. It was Annie’s mother who encouraged her interest in astronomy, teaching her the constellations. Annie went on to study physics and astronomy at Wellesley, one of the top academic schools for women in the US. Annie did not take to the cold winter climate and on one occassion was striken with scarlet fever that rendered her almost completely deaf. She graduated in 1884 with a degree in physics and returned home, but grew restless with the limited career options open to women. Her hearing loss made it difficult to socialise, although she made a trip to Europe to photograph the solar eclipse in 1892. She returned home and in 1894 her mother died. She eventually reapproached her teachers at Wellesley and took graduate courses there in astronomy. She also learnt about spectroscopy and photography. In order to gain access to a better telescope she enrolled at Radcliffe Women’s College at Harvard, which gace her access to the Harvard College Observatory. In 1896 she joined the Harvard College Observatory women under director Edward Pickering and by 1907 she had received an M.A. from Wellesley. Her role, like the other women there, was to reduce data and carry out astronomical observations. In particular, Pickering’s interest lay in obtaining optical spectra of thousands of stars and to index and classify them by their spectra. This analysis was begun by Nettie Farrar and contined by Williamina Fleming, who devised a classification system with 22 classes. The work was continued by Antonia Maury who invented her own system. Finally Annie Cannon took over, and applied her own scheme which resulted in the famous OBAFGKM classification which is still used today. The ordering of the letters of Fleming’s original system were rearranged by Cannon into order of decreasing surface temperature. Cannon classified the most stars in a lifetime than anyone else has ever achieved, around 350,000, published in Draper catalogues. She could classify three stars a minute just by looking at their spectral patterns, and using a magnifying glass could classify stars down to 9th magnitude, around 16 times fainter than the human eye can see. She also published catalogues of variable stars, including 300 that she had discovered herself. At this time, women astronomers were paid 25 cents a day, much less than the secretatries at Harvard were paid. Her career spanned more than forty years and she received many "firsts", including the first recipient of an honorary doctorate from Oxford and the first woman elected an officer of the American Astronomical Society. At Harvard she became the Curator of Astronomical Photographs after Fleming, but it wasn’t until 1938, just two years before her retirement, that she obtained a regular Harvard appointment as William C. Bond Astronomer. She also received the Henry Draper Medal which only one other female has won, she shared it with a male colleague. She was also listed as one of the 12 greatest living american women by the National League of Women Voters. There is now the Annie Cannon Prize, awarded to women astronomers who have made outstanding contributions in astronomy. ||

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 * Hypatia of Alexandria (?370 -415)

The exact date of Hypatia’s birth is uncertain, but records suggest sometime between 350 and 370 AD. Born in Alexandra in Egypt, she also studied in Greece, and is considered by many as the first notable female mathematician and astronomer, which she explored alongside her philosophy teachings. She was a strong advocate of the Plotinus way of thinking, which encouraged logical thinking and mathematical studies, and she eventually became the head of the Platonist school at Alexandria in around 400 AD. She primarily taught philosophy, in particular the works of Plato and Aristotle. People would travel from other cities to hear Hypatia lecture on different topics. Hypatia contributed to many works, some collaborative efforts with her father Theon Alexandricus, who according to the Byzantune encyclopedia, was the last head of the Museum at Alexandria. In his education of her, Theon taught her about different religions of the world, as well as how to keep good physical health. Hypatia’s most notable contributions to astronomy and science include the charting of celestial bodies and the invention of the hydrometer, used to determine the relative density and gravity of liquids. She is most well known in mathematics for her work on conic sections, introduced by Apollonius, which divided cones into different parts by a plane, which developed the ideas of hyperbolas, parabolas and ellipses. She edited the works //On the Conics of Apollonius// making them easy to understand, and thus allowing the work to survive the course of time. Hypatia did not act like ‘normal’ women at the time – she dressed in the clothing of a scholar or teacher rather than in traditional womens clothes, and drove her own chariot in order to move freely around the Empire. She would don a philospher’s cloak and preach freely about Plato or Aristotle. Hypatia lived in Alexandria when Christianity began to dominate, and rioting between religions was commonplace. A Pagan, Hypatia was referred to as a “valiant defender of science against religion”, her life was ended brutally by a Christian mob who blamed her for religious turmoil. It is claimed that her body was stripped of flesh and her body parts scattered through the streets, and burnt. But her legacy lived on. Her students fled to Athens, where the study of mathematics flourished, and the school she headed in Alexandria contined until Arabs invaded in 642 AD. Many of her works that were housed in the library of Alexandria were destroyed by Arab conquerors – their existence known only through letters exchanged between her contempories. ||

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 * Williamina Fleming (1857 - 1911)

Williamina was a scottish astronomer born in 1857 in Dundee, where she also attended public schools. When she was 21 she moved to Boston with her husband, and fell pregnant. However, her husband abandoned her and she had to seek work to support herself and her new son, Edward. She became a maid in the home of Professor Edward Charles Pickering, who ran the Harvard College Observatory. He famously stated that he was frustrated with his male assistants and that his maid, Williamina, was capable of doing a better job. Thus, she was employed to do clerical work at the observatory. She soon demonstrated her flare for astronomy and devised a system to classify stars according to how much hydrogen they displayed in their spectra. She also contributed to the cataloguing of stars that would be published as the Henry Draper Catalogue, and in nine years she catalogued over 10,000 stars as well as discovering 59 gaseous nebulae, 310 variable stars and 10 novae. She also discovered the Horsehead nebula on a photographic plate taken by William Pickering. In 1899, Williamina had proved herself to the extent that she became Curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard, and was placed in charge of dozens of other women hired to perform star counts and classifications. In 1906 she became the first American women to be given hononary membership to the Royal Astronomical Society of London. She was also awarded the Guadalupe Alemndaro medal by the Astronomical Society of Mexico for her discovery of new stars. She published A Photographic Study of Variable Stars in 1907 and Spectra and Photographic Magnitudes of Stars in Standard Regions in 1911. She died of pneumonia at the age of 54. She has the crater Fleming named jointly for her and Alexander Fleming. ||

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 * Wang Zhenyi (1768 - 1797)

She studied mathematics especially trigonometry, and became interested in lunar eclipses. She modelled them by placing a round table in a garden pavilion (using it as a globe), from the ceiling she hung a lamp (using it as the Sun) and on one side of the table she had a big round mirror (as the Moon). Moving them around according to astronomica principles she could see how the lunar eclipse occurred, and her article 'On the Explanation of the Lunar Eclipse' was highly accurate. In 'Of the Ball-Shaped Earth', she attempted to describe why people would not fall off a spherical Earth, and also attempted to describe the cosmos and the relationship of the Earth within it. She advocated that within society men and women "are all people, who have the same reason for studying". (see Notable Women of China by Barbara Bennett Peterson, He Hong Fei, Guangyu Zhang for more information) ||

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= Maria Mitchell =

(1818-1889)
Maria Mitchell, an American astronomer, was born August 1, 1818 in Nantucket, Massachusetts, USA. Her father, a member of the Quaker religion felt strongly that girls should receive education equal to that of boys. When Maria was sixteen she was already a teaching assistant to a schoolmaster. He was Cyrus Peirce, the founder of the first normal school in America, nowadays called a teacher's college. Whe she was seventeen she decided to open a school of her own. She rented a room and put an advertisement in the newspaper. The school closed after a year when Maria was offered a job as a librarian of Nantucket's Atheneum Library. This job was perfect for her, because she was earning a good salary and had time to study and read books. Her father also was hired as cashier of the Pacific Bank. With his new job came the living quarters attached to the bank. Mr. Mitchell built an observatory on the roof and installed a brand-new four-inch telescope. He used it to do star observations for the United States Coast Guard and Maria helped her father with the measurements. One night in the Autumn of 1847, Maria looked at the sky through the telescope and saw a star five degrees above the North Star where there had been no star before. She had memorized the sky and was sure of her observation. It occurred to her that this might be a comet. Maria recorded the presumed comet's coordinates. The next night the star moved again. This time she was sure it was a comet. Her father wrote to Professor William Bond at the Harvard University observatory about Maria's discovery. Professor Bond submitted Maria's name to the king of Denmark who had offered a gold medal to a person who discovers a comet seen only through a telescope. Another person, Father Francesco de Vico of Rome discovered the same comet two days later than Maria Mitchell and the decision was made to award him the prize before news of Maria's earlier discovery arrived in Europe. After some negotiations Maria Mitchell was awarded the medal for this discovery a year later. The comet was named "Miss Mitchell's Comet." She continued working as a librarian, but now she was also receiving letters of congratulations from scientists and tourists were coming to take a look at the woman astronomer. In 1848 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences voted her the first woman member. The Association for the Advancement of Science did the same in 1850. In 1849 she was offered a job by the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office as a computer (one who does computations) of tables of positions of the planet Venus. She also started traveling to attend scientific meetings. In 1856 she received an offer from a rich man named General Swift to accompany his daughter Prudence on a trip to the South and to Europe. Maria accepted and took her almanac work with her. They went south to New Orleans, then to London, where Maria visited the Greenwich Observatory. Prudence returned to the States, but Maria remained in Europe. She went to France on her own, then continued on to Rome with Nathaniel Hawthorne's family. She had hoped to visit the Vatican Observatory, but she was told that women were not admitted. She tried to get special permission and finally succeeded, but was allowed to go in only in the daytime. She was not able to look at the stars through the telescope at night. After her return home, she was presented with a new telescope bought with money collected by women for the first woman astronomer of the United States. She used it to study sunspots and other astronomical events. In 1865 she became professor of astronomy and director of the college observatory at the newly-opened Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York where she had the use of a twelve-inch telescope, the third largest in the United States. She often invited her students to come up to the observatory at night and watch meteor showers or other astronomical events. Maria Mitchell continued her own research in studying the surface features of Jupiter and Saturn and photographing stars. In 1869 she was the first woman elected to the American Philosophical Society. In 1873, she helped found the American Association for the Advancement of Women and served as its president from 1874 to 1876. In 1873 she attended the first meeting of the Women's Congress. The Congress was also attended by many women's rights activists, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, etc. Maria Mitchell retired from Vassar in 1888 because of poor health. She died June 28, 1889 in Lynn, Massachusetts. Soon after Maria's death her friends and supporters founded the Maria Mitchell Association on Nantucket in 1902. In 1905 she was elected to the Hall of Fame of Great Americans at New York University (now at Bronx Community College). In 1994, she was elected to the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. The house on Nantucket where Maria was born is open to the public during the summer. For further information on Maria Mitchell, contact the Maria Mitchell Association at [] Contributed by Danuta Bois, 1996. Corrections submitted by Mara Alper, Curator, Maria Mitchell Birthplace Bibliography:1. [|//Rooftop Astronomer//] by Stephanie Sammartino McPherson, Carolrhoda Books, Inc., 1990 2. [|//American Women's History//] by Doris Weatherford, Prentice Hall General Reference, 1994 3. [|//The Book of Women's Firsts: Breakthrough Achievements of Almost 1,000 American Women//] by Phyllis J. Read and Bernard L. Witlieb, Random House, 1992 4. [|//Women of Science: Righting the Record//], edited by G. Kass-Simon and Patricia Farnes, Indiana University Press, 1993 5. [|//Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters and Journals//], edited by Phebe Mitchell Kendall, Lee and Shepard, 1896