84 Famous Female Scientists Trivia Questions with Answers
84 public questions with answers, drawn from the well. How many can you answer?
Who became the first woman to receive the ACM A.M. Turing Award, winning it in 2006?
Answer
Frances E. Allen
Which mathematician became the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics in modern Europe, in 1874?
Answer
Sofia Kovalevskaya
Which physicist discovered the Mössbauer effect in 1958?
Answer
Rudolf Mössbauer
Which biochemist discovered the first restriction enzyme, HindII, in 1970?
Answer
Hamilton Smith
Which microbiologist discovered bacteriophage lambda while studying Escherichia coli in 1950?
Answer
Esther Lederberg
Which American astronomer discovered that Cepheid variable stars could measure distances across the universe?
Answer
Henrietta Swan Leavitt
Which astronomer discovered the periodic comet 35P/Herschel–Rigollet in 1788?
Answer
Caroline Herschel
Which mathematician became the first woman to receive the Abel Prize, in 2019?
Answer
Karen Uhlenbeck
Which astronomer became the first woman to win the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy, in 1934?
Answer
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Which chemist became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone, receiving it in 1964?
Answer
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
Which paleontologist discovered the first known dinosaur eggs in Mongolia during the 1920s?
Answer
Roy Chapman Andrews
Which physicist discovered pulsars in 1967 while studying radio signals from space?
Answer
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Which chemist shared the 2020 Nobel Prize for developing CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing?
Answer
Jennifer Doudna
Which astronomer showed in 1925 that hydrogen and helium dominate the composition of stars?
Answer
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Which computer scientist led the software team that guided NASA’s Apollo missions?
Answer
Margaret Hamilton
Which astronomer became the first woman paid as a professional astronomer in Britain?
Answer
Caroline Herschel
Which physicist discovered artificial radioactivity with Frédéric Joliot-Curie in 1934?
Answer
Irène Joliot-Curie
Which physician pioneered the use of statistical graphics to improve hospital sanitation during the Crimean War?
Answer
Florence Nightingale
Which biologist proposed the endosymbiotic theory of how complex cells evolved?
Answer
Lynn Margulis
Which Soviet cosmonaut became the first woman in space aboard Vostok 6 in 1963?
Answer
Valentina Tereshkova
Which chemist invented Kevlar, the exceptionally strong synthetic fiber, in 1965?
Answer
Stephanie Kwolek
Which physicist discovered the positron in 1932 using a cloud chamber?
Answer
Carl D. Anderson