84 Famous Female Scientists Trivia Questions with Answers
84 public questions with answers, drawn from the well. How many can you answer?
Which mathematician and astronomer discovered the first known asteroid, Ceres, in 1801?
Answer
Giuseppe Piazzi
Which astronomer classified more than 350,000 stars at Harvard Observatory?
Answer
Annie Jump Cannon
Which physician and virologist developed the first successful vaccine against rubella?
Answer
Stanley Plotkin
Which scientist won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering nerve growth factor?
Answer
Rita Levi-Montalcini
Which mathematician became the first woman to win the Fields Medal in 2014?
Answer
Maryam Mirzakhani
Which chemist won the 2018 Nobel Prize for developing directed evolution of enzymes?
Answer
Frances Arnold
Which geneticist showed in 1905 that chromosomes determine sex in mealworms?
Answer
Nettie Stevens
Which astronomer discovered the period–luminosity relation for Cepheid variable stars in 1908?
Answer
Henrietta Swan Leavitt
Which physicist shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model?
Answer
Maria Goeppert Mayer
Which physicist calculated the trajectory for John Glenn’s 1962 orbital flight?
Answer
Katherine Johnson
Which physicist confirmed parity violation in the 1956 Wu experiment?
Answer
Chien-Shiung Wu
Which geneticist was the first woman to win the National Medal of Science?
Answer
Barbara McClintock
Which scientist’s 1952 X-ray image of DNA became known as Photograph 51?
Answer
Rosalind Franklin
Which marine biologist wrote Silent Spring, published in 1962?
Answer
Rachel Carson
Which chemist determined the structure of penicillin using X-ray crystallography?
Answer
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
Which scientist discovered transposons, or “jumping genes,” in maize?
Answer
Barbara McClintock
Which astronomer discovered that stars are mainly composed of hydrogen and helium?
Answer
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Which scientist developed the first widely used vaccine against smallpox?
Answer
Edward Jenner
Which British scientist discovered pulsars in 1967 as a graduate student?
Answer
Jocelyn Bell Burnell