Alicia Boole Stott Envisions the Fourth Dimension

Alicia Boole Stott, linocut print, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2026

 The 9th prompt for #PrinterSolstice2526 is volume, so I thought I would portray a mathematician. Not satisfied with regular old three dimensional volumes, I made a portrait of Anglo-Irish mathematician Alicia Boole Stott (1860-1940), so let's talk about four and more dimensions.

Alicia Boole Stott (1860-1940), the third of five daughters, came to mathematics honestly. Her father George Boole, like her, was an autodidact mathematician, philosopher and logician, who served as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork, in Ireland and developed Boolean logic, which would later prove so essential to computer programming. Likewise, her mother Mary Everest Boole was an autodidact mathematician and educator, who was further tutored by George and who edited his book on algebraic language, Laws of Thought. When she was only four years old, her father died, and facing poverty, Mary returned to England with Alicia's sisters, where she found a job as a librarian at Queen's College, London and worked as a mathematics tutor. Mary developed her own novel ideas about fostering imagination in teaching mathematics and science to children. She believed that physical manipulation of objects like sticks and stones, or stitching curves onto cards could help children form an understanding of mathematical concepts. She integrated fables, history, philosophy and literature and a fanciful writing style into teaching mathematics to appeal to children. Her ideas on education were not the only way Mary was unconventional; she organized discussion groups with Queen's College students with John Hinton a promulgator of polygamy, much to the disapproval of the authorities.  She was a believer in parapsychology and the occult and was the first woman to join the Society of Psychical Research. She wrote about topics which were controversial at the time, like the occult, eastern philosophy, evolution and animal rights, as well as the pedagogy of mathematics, so most of her books were published long after they were written. 

Unlike her sisters, Alicia stayed in Cork with her grandmother and great-uncle, until she was 11, when she rejoined her mother and sisters in London. Alicia had felt repressed and unhappy living in Cork, but the lodgings her mother could afford in London were "poor, dark, dirty and uncomfortable." The five girls had to share a room. Her mother sold George's Royal Society Gold Medal, to buy a harmonium so they could have music at home. Alicia went to the school attached to Queen's College London. Mary brought up her daughters doing things like projecting shapes of things such as hanging pendulums onto paper "to acquaint them with the flow of geometry." Alicia learned mathematics from her mother and the first two books of Euclid. She did not attend university. Mary had to leave her job as librarian and become a secretary for John Hinton. When she was 17, Alicia returned briefly to Cork, where she worked in a children's hospital but soon returned to London. She learned about higher-dimensional spaces from her future brother-in-law, mathematician Charles Howard Hinton (son of John Hinton). Charles had mystical beliefs about the fourth dimension and thought we humans inhabit a 4D space we will eventually perceive. He had crafted 4D models with hundreds of small coloured cubes of wood, each labelled with its own Latin name, which he shared with the Boole sisters. He used his cubes to try and get the sisters to visualize a 4D hypercube, for which he coined the word tesseract. His cubes became a popular, but notoriously difficult approach to grappling with 4D geometry; Alicia was the only one who mastered them, becoming more adept than Hinton himself. Among other books, Hinton went on to write The Fourth Dimension. 

There are analogues to 3D shapes in 4D. Imagine the five Platonic solids: the cube, the tetrahedron (a pyramid with a triangular base so it has 4 equilateral triangle sides), the octahedron (like two pyramids glued together at the square base so it has 8 equilateral triangles as faces), the dodecahedron (with 12 pentagonal faces) and the icosahedron (with 20 equilateral triangle faces). These are 3D shapes bound with regular polygons with the same number of edges at each vertex. If you relax the rule that the faces must all be the same, you get the collection of semiregular polyhedra. Each of the Platonic solids, along with  the  the familiar convex regular polygons (equilateral triangle, square, regular pentagon, regular hexagon and so on) has what is called a 4-polytope, which is an analogue in 4D where faces are replaced with 3D cells of identical Platonic solids. Similarly, there are semiregular polytopes you can define from the semiregular polyhedra. 

Alicia discovered that there are exactly 6 regular convex 4-polytopes. Swiss mathematician Ludwig Schläli had beat her to this discovery, in 1850 before she was born, but he had not published his work. He had submitted his manuscript for publication, but it was rejected as it was too lengthy. It was finally published 6 years after he died. He named these shapes polyscheme, but Alicia introduced her term polytope (based on the German term polytop) as she was unaware of Schläli's work (and her term was the one adopted). American mathematician Washington Irving Stringham rediscovered 6 regular convex 4-polytopes and published his results in 1880, but Alicia was unaware of his paper and working in isolation. In 1884, English theologian and schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott published a satirical novella called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions in which lines and 2D polyhedral characters living on a plane encounter a 3D sphere; as it moves through the plane the sphere appears as cross-sections, a sequence of growing and shrinking circles. Analogously, Alicia was able to visualize 4-polytopes as 3D cross-sections, allowing her to unfold a 4D problem into 3D problems. Simply using Euclidean constructions and synthetic methods (the only tools at her disposal, having never learned analytic geometry) she was able to produce 3D central cross-sections of all 6 regular polytypes in 4D, and make coloured drawings and cardboard models of each. Of these 6, 5 are 4D analogues of the Platonic solids (the hypercube or 8-cell, the hyperoctahedron or 16-cell, the hypertetrahedron or 5-cell, the 120-cell and the 600-cell) and 6th, called the 24-cell, has no 3D analogue.

 From left to right, from top to bottom: Mary Stott, G.I. Taylor, Margaret Taylor, P.H. Schoute, A. Boole Stott [Boole Stott, undated(b)]. (Courtesy of the University of Bristol.)

She contributed to Hinton's 1888 book A New Era of Thought, about higher-dimensional reasoning, writing about sections of 3D solids and part of the preface. (By the time the book came out, Hinton and his wife Mary Ellen Boole Hinton had gone to Japan, following his conviction for bigamy for marrying a second wife under an assumed name. This surprising fact is perhaps less so when we recall he was the son of the radical proponent of polygamy, John Hinton). In 1889, she began secretarial work near Liverpool, working for lawyer and amateur mathematician H. John Falk, who was editing Hinton's book. In 1890 she met actuary Walter Stott, who joined Alicia and Falk on editing a new edition of Hinton's book. The pair married  had two children: Mary in 1891 and Leonard in 1892. According to Coxeter, "for some years she led a life of drudgery, rearing her two children on a very small income." In 1895 Walter told her of Dutch mathematician Pieter Schoute's work on central sections of the regular polytopes and she saw that his drawings matched her 3D models, so she mailed him photographs of her work. Schoute replied, asking to meet and collaborate which they did until he died two decades later. They wrote letters back and forth and some summers Schoute would come to stay with the Stott family in England so they could work together. He eventually convinced her to publish, which she did in two papers published in Amsterdam in 1900 and 1910. In her second paper, she was there first person to enumerate all 45 semi-regular polytopes. They also co-authored papers in 1908 and 1910. In 1907, they presented her models at the annual British Association of the Advancement of Science in Leicester. In 1912 Schoute presented his work on semiregular polytopes to the 5th International Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge, crediting her with the roots of his proof. She made complete sets of models of 120-cell and 600-cell polytopes and left them with Schoute. When he died in 1913, Alicia took a hiatus from mathematics. The University of Groningen granted her an honorary doctorate in 1914, and exhibited her models. She was invited to the ceremony but not able to attend. When the degree arrived in the mail in a cardboard cylinder, she exclaimed, "This will be a good place to keep sticks of macaroni!" 

In 1930, when Alicia was 70, her nephew, physicist Geoffrey Ingram Taylor introduced her to the now famed British-Canadian mathematician Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter who was 23 and a graduate student at Cambridge at the time. Despite their age difference they two became good friends. Like Taylor, Coxeter called her Aunt Alice. Coxeter wrote, "The strength and simplicity of her character combined with the diversity of her interests made her an inspiring friend." The two met regularly and began working together on topics in 4D geometry. He invited her to one of his supervisor H.F. Baker's celebrated geometry tea parties, where they presented a joint paper and she brought a set of her models, which she then donated to the department of mathematics. They collaborated on the investigation of a special kind of 4D polytope (Gosset's 4D polytope s{3,4,3}) for which she made models of its sections. Alicia made two more important discoveries about constructions for polyhedra related to the golden section. With Coxeter, she presented a joint paper at the University of Cambridge. When Coxeter moved to Toronto in 1936 to take up a professorship at U of T, Alicia gave him an antique stained-glass Archimedean solid shade and wrote to him, "My dear! I don't know how to write to you - words seem so futile besides so great a separation! But indeed one can rejoice, for your sake, that it happened so... While I have been writing my mind has gone back to the lovely world we have visited together, and which you have made so much your own. I wonder where you will get to in it! How I wish I could follow." They managed to continue their collaboration, despite their separation, until her death in 1940. Coxeter when on to work at U of T for 60 years and become regarded as one of the greatest geometers of the 20th century. Much of what we know about Alicia's life is thanks to Coxeter's reminiscing about his dear Aunt Alice.

My portrait contains her 3D unfolding of part of a hypercube, her colour drawings of some of the 3-principle sections of the 600-cell, her expansion of the octahedron - a truncated octahedron, sections of of the 16-cell.

p.s. I have related Alicia's life to some of her family, including mathematician father George Boole, mathematician, educator and activist mother Mary Everest Boole, brother-in-law mathematician (and bigamist) Charles Hinton, nephew physicist Geoffrey Ingram Taylor (who went on to be knighted and win the gold medal of the Royal Society, like his grandfather). But, I recommend reading Moira Chas' article 'The Extraordinary Case of the Boole Family' to also learn about further surprising and fascinating family. Alicia's sister Mary Ellen, first wife of Charles Hinton, was a poet. Charles Hinton also invented a baseball-pitching machine and wrote mathematical romances. Her sister Margaret (mother of Geoffrey Ingram Taylor) was a painter. Her sister Lucy Everest Boole was a Lecturer in chemistry at the London School of Medicine for Women and the first woman elected a Fellow of the Institute of Chemistry. Her sister Ethel was an activist concerned about the plight of the Russian people under Tsarist rule and travelled to Russian where she visited prisons, smuggled propaganda, composed music and wrote wildly successful novels (one of which was made into a film with music by Shostakovich). She married Polish exile and rare book expert Wilfred Voynich, who bought the famed, mysterious, medieval manuscript in an as-of-yet-undeciphered text illustrated with dreamlike images of strange plants and creatures, known as the Voynich manuscript. Alicia's son Leonard was a medical doctor and pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis who inked a portable x-ray machine, an artificial pneumothorax apparatus and a system of navigation based on spherical geometry. Alicia's nephew Sebastian Hinton invented the jungle gym (inspired by the bamboo structures his father built while in self-imposed exile in Japan to teach his children about 3- and 4-D shapes). Sebastian married Carmelita Chase who founded the progressive Putney School, a boarding school in Vermont (where Coxeter was invited and considered working). Alicia's grandniblings Howard Everest Hinton became a distinguished entomologist, William Hinton a Marxist writer and Joan Hinton a nuclear physicist involved in the Manhattan Project who was so appalled by the consequences of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima she became a pacifist, gave up physics, moved to China and became a Maoist. Alicia's great-grandniblings include award-winning documentarian Carma Hinton and 2018 Turing Award-winning A.I. researcher Geoffrey Everest Hinton. 

References

Alicia Boole Stott, Wikipedia, accessed February, 2026. 

Boole Stott, Alicia. On Certain Series of Sections of the Regular Four Dimensional Hypersolids. Verhnadelingen Natuurkunde, Eerste Sectie, deel 7, nummer 3 (1900), pp. 1-21. 

Chas, Moira. The Extraordinary Case of the Boole Family. Notices of the American Mathematical Society. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1090/noti1996. December, 2019. 

O'Connor, J.J. and E.F. Robertson, Alicia Boole Stott, MacTutor Archive, University of St Andrews. July 2014.

Polo-Blanco, Irene. Alicia Boole Stott, a geometer in higher dimension. Historia Mathematica. Volume 35, Issue 2. pp. 123-139. May, 2008.

Polo-Blanco, Irene. Alicia Boole Stott's models of sections of polytypes. Lettera Mathematica. Volume 2, pp. 149-154. September 9, 204.

Riddle, Larry. Alicia Boole Stott. Biographies of Women Mathematicians. Agnes Scott College. February 19, 2025

Microbiologist Esther Lederberg, Printmaking to Replica Plating, the Lambda Phage and Bacterial Fertility Factor F

Esther Lederberg, linocut print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2026

The 8th #PrinterSolstice2526 prompt is two, so I thought of duplicates. This reminded me of trailblazing microbiologist Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg (1922-2006) whose pioneering contributions to bacterial genetics include such fundamentals as the first successful implementation of replica plating (with her first husband, Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg) which allows microbiologists to reproduce a pattern of microbes on different Petri dishes and, for instance, compare their response to various things put in each plate. Reading about how they would press a velveteen-covered disk onto the primary plate with microorganisms and then imprinting the secondary plate (or plates) with the same distribution of microbes, I recognized this as printmaking, so I was delighted to read that her biographer believes she was inspired by having worked in her father's print shop as an adolescent. She also discovered the lambda phage and the bacterial fertility factor F. While she and Joshua both were awarded the Pasteur Medal from the Society of Illinois Bacteriologists, Esther's contributions, including work she did on her own, were often misattributed to Joshua, and she was not included in his Nobel win, nor was she even ever offered a tenured position. In life, she cared more about the science than her reputation, but today microbiologists are working to make sure she gets more of the recognition she always deserved.

Microbiologist Esther Lederberg (née Zimmer, 1922-2007) made discoveries fundamental to modern understanding of bacterial gene regulation, recombination and exchange, but her work was both overshadowed by, and sometimes misattributed to her male collaborators. 

Esther and her younger brother Benjamin were children of Orthodox Jewish Romanian immigrant, David and Pauline Geller Zimmer, herself the daughter of Romanian immigrants, who ran a print shop in the Bronx. Money was tight. The Zimmer children grew up helping in the shop during the Great Depression. David's siblings worked in the garment industry.  Esther had a talent for language. Esther pleased her maternal grandfather by learning Hebrew, unlike her cousins, and won awards for French and Spanish at school. She graduated from Evander Childs High School when she was only 15, and won a scholarship to attend Hunter College, where she planned to study French or literature. Once there, she chose to switch to biochemistry, though teachers warned she would have trouble finding a job, as a woman. Nonetheless she found work as a research assistant working on Neurospora crassa, a red bread mold,  with plant pathologist Bernard Oglivie Dodge. By the time she was 19 in 1942 she had graduated cum laude with a BSc in genetics. 

She got a position with Alexander Hollander at the Carnegie Institution of Washington (later the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), continuing her work on N. crassa and making her first scientific publication. She won a fellowship for Standford in 1944 to work with George Wells Beadle and Edward Tatum (who together would later go on to win the 1958 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine with her future husband Joshua Lederberg). Tatum told her would only teach her genetics if she could work out why one of the Drosophila fruit flies in a bottle had different coloured eyes; she did this so well, he made her his Teaching Assistant. After summer school at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station with microbiologist Cornelius Van Niel, she entered the master's program, and completed her M.A. in genetics with her thesis "Mutant Strains of Neurospora Deficient in Para-Aminobenzoic Acid" in 1946. She married one of Tatum's students at Yale, Joshua Lederberg, and moved to Yale's Botanical Laboratory. Joshua completed his doctorate in 1947 and was offered an assistant professorship at the University of Wisconsin, so the couple moved to Madison, Wisconsin. Esther enrolled in the doctoral program and was awarded a fellowship by the National Cancer Institute. Joshua developed a reputation as a brilliant thinker while Esther developed a reputation as a skilled expert experimentalist and they worked well as a team. Her 1950 doctoral thesis under supervision of plant geneticist R.A. Brink was titled "Genetic control of mutability in the bacterium Escherichia coli". She had already made some foundational discoveries of the fertility factor, but Joshua insisted she focus on completing her PhD, rather than follow up with further experimentation. 

She spent most of the 50s at the University of Wisconsin, and in 1951 she discovered the lambda bacteriophage, a virus which infects and replicates within bacteria, and she published a detailed description in Genetics in 1953 with Joshua as the second author. He had asked her to wait before publishing because he felt it was not the top priority for the lab at that time. When Joshua won the 1953 Eli Lilly Award he told a reporter that Esther should have be recognized too. The lambda phage became a foundational discovery in molecular genetics, invaluable for understanding gene regulation and recombination. She incubated a mix of a parent E. coli K12 strain and a mutant E. coli K12 strain made with UV light and saw plaques, which indicated the presence of a bacteriophage. This type of virus would have been killed by UV light, so it must have come from the parent strain. She called this the lambda phage and found it had two lifestyles: either the typical, well-known phage lifestyle, the lytic cycle, where it rapidly made copies of itself inside the E.coli before bursting out (called lysis) or alternatively existing quietly as just another genetic marker within E. coli, without killing the cell.  With her husband, she found that the quiescent form genetically mapped near the genes in the E. coli which metabolize lactose sugar (gal). The Lederbergs proposed that the lambda's genetic material integrates into the E. coli chromosome next to the gal genes, which let it replicate as a prophage along with the host bacteria's own DNA (a process called lysogeny). This was the first time this 2-part cycle had ever  been described and today, the lambda phage is a key model for understanding other viruses (such as herpes simplex virus) which exhibit these split lytic-lysogenic lifecycles. To leave the host, the prophage needs to excise itself from the bacterial DNA and sometimes when this occurs the phage DNA is accompanied by some adjacent host DNA which the phage can then introduce into a new host; this is called specialized transduction.  Esther presented her lambda studies, including  λ lysogeny and specialized transduction in Canberra, at the Symposium of Bacterial and Viral Genetics in 1957, and her results on where it integrates, the fine-structure mapping of the gal locus in Montreal in 1958 at the 10th International Congress of Genetics.

While studying where the lambda prophage, she crossed bacteria with the prophage with strains without the prophage but will known genetic markers. She found that some crosses failed to form recombinants. She suspected something, a fertility factor, must be missing, writing that during her studies, "one day, ZERO recombinants were recovered... I explored the notion that there was some sort of 'fertility factor' which if absent, resulted in no recombinants. For short, I names this F." She published with Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and Joshua. She was right and others' later research showed that F was a DNA sequence with genes which allow a bacterium to donate DNA to a recipient bacterium by direct contact or conjugation. This DNA sequence can be either an independent plasmid or integrated into the cell's chromosome. Likely because of the delay between her discovery of the fertility factor F and her follow-up experiments and publications, this work is often unfairly primarily attributed to Joshua in textbooks. 

Microbiologists had been struggling to make identical geometrical configurations of microbes on multiple plates and tried using everything from toothpicks, paper, wire brushes and multi-pronged inoculators, until Esther and Joshua successfully implemented their simple solution to replica plating. Their process, pressing a plate of bacterial colonies onto sterile velvet and stamping them onto secondary plates of media with different ingredients to suit the traits needed for study (for instance, containing various antibiotics), mimics how a press works, like in Esther's father's shop! The first time she tried out the idea, she was inspired by her own powder puff, the velveteen pad in her makeup compact. It was, after all, designed to transfer powdered makeup to a person's face; maybe it could transfer configurations of microbes from plate to plate, so she tried it. Esther, whose family were garment workers, was the one familiar with textiles and she used this knowledge to source the best fabric for the job. Nonetheless, this method has also often been inaccurately credited to Joshua only. Since they could reliably replicate their plates, they were able to show, as previously demonstrated by Luria and Delbrück, that bacteriophage- and and antibiotic-resistant mutants spontaneously arose even in the absence of phages or antibiotics. These mutations were not occurring in response to their environment, as held by Lamarckism. Luria and Delbrück's work relied on mathematical arguments and had not gained traction but the simplicity of the Lederbergs' methods finally convinced their colleagues. Their method for replica plating remains a staple of microbiological laboratory work today.

In 1956, both Lederbergs jointly won the Pasteur Award for their contributions to science.  In 1958, Joshua Lederberg shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering bacterial conjugation, with Edward Tatum and George Beadle for their work with genetics. Joshua had discovered that bacteria do not only make identical copies of themselves; they sometimes reproduce by mixing genetic material, as occurs in sexual reproduction, to make something new. Esther, whose work, like discovering the fertility factor with allows this genetic mixing to occur, was essential to, or made in collaboration with Joshua's research, was not included in his win. Attending the formal ceremony in Stockholm, by his side, in her gown, only playing the role of scientist's spouse, must have been bittersweet. Esther became perceived as merely his research assistant. Joshua thanked her simply for her "companionship" in his acceptance speech. Castelli-Sforza wrote, "Dr. Esther Lederberg has enjoyed the privilege of working with a very famous husband. This has been at times also a setback, because inevitably she has not been credited with as much of the credit as she really deserved. I know that very few people, if any, have had the benefit of as valuable a co-worker as Joshua has had."

In 1959 Esther and Joshua returned to Stanford, where Joshua became the head of the Genetics department. Esther could not be employed in the Genetics department because of anti-nepotism rules. Esther and two other women petitioned the dean of the medical school over the lack of female faculty. Eventually she got an untenured faculty position as a research associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, where Esther worked for the rest of her career. This meant that her job was not secure and her short-term appointment was renewed on a rolling basis, dependent on her ability to secure grants. After their divorce in 1968, Esther had to fight to retain her position. She founded and directed the Plasmid Reference Center (PRC) from 1976 to 1986, where she organized, maintained, named, and distributed plasmids of various types including those coding for antibiotic-resistances, heavy-metal-resistance, virulence, conjugation, colicins, transposons and insertion sequences. Her sequential numbering system continued until her retirement. In 1974 she was effectively demoted and forced to transition to an adjunct professor of medical microbiology. She retired from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in 1985 but continued as a volunteer at the PRC.

While not working as a scientist, Esther was a devoted amateur musician focusing on early music, playing medieval, Renaissance and baroque music on original instruments including several different sizes of recorder. She founded the Mid-Peninsula Recorder Orchestra, which plays music dating back to the 13th century, in 1962.  A lover of the works of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, she belonged to the Dickens Society of Palo Alto and the Jane Austen Society. Through her pursuit of early music, she met fellow enthusiast, engineer Matthew Simon newly arrived at Stanford in 1989, and they married in 1993. She died in 2006 of pneumonia and congestive heart failure at age 83. Esther always thought the science itself was more important than her reputation, but her second husband understood that her work was under-appreciated because she was a woman. Simon has worked tirelessly to make an extensive memorial website for Esther, so her story and role in the development of microbial genetics is not forgotten. The wealth of biographical information and documents there from her career has helped her biographers and microbiologists working to tell a more complete and accurate story of the development of their field.

References

Esther Lederberg, Wikipedia, accessed February, 2026.

Barron, Madeline. Esther Lederberg and the Rise of Microbial Genetics. American Society for Microbiology. October 4, 2023. 

Joshua Lederberg, Wikipedia, accessed February, 2026.

Lederberg, J and E.M. Lederberg. Replica plating and indirect selection of bacterial mutants. J Bacteriol. 1952 Mar;63(3):399-406. doi: 10.1128/jb.63.3.399-406.1952. PMID: 14927572; PMCID: PMC169282.

Simon, Matthew. Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg Memorial Website. Accessed February, 2026

Steinmetz, Katy. Esther Lederberg and Her Husband Were Both Trailblazing Scientists. Why Have More People Heard of Him? Time Magazine. April 11, 2019.

"Women in Microbiology -Esther Lederberg" Live session from ASM Microbe 2017 hosted by Hazel Barton with guest Mark O. Martin interviewed by Rebecca V. Ferrell.

Zeldovich, Linda, Esther Lederberg changed our understanding of how bacteria breed. Popular Science, May 23, 2022.

Agnes Pockels Find Wonder While Washing Dishes and Invents Surface Science

Agnes Pockels, linocut, 11" x 14" on Japanese paper, by Ele Willoughby, 2026

The seventh prompt for #PrinterSolstice2026 is division, and I have decided to focus on the dividing line or interface, and the self-taught scientist who pioneered surface science. 

When Agnes Pockels (1862-1935) was 18, she did not get the chance to go to university and study physics like her brother Friedrich, who became a professor of theoretical physics and discovered the Pockels effect studying optics and electromagnetism. She took her "passionate interest for natural science" to those household chores she was allowed to pursue, and applied her analytic mind and careful observation to what she saw even in greasy dishwater. She became fascinated with how soap behaves on the surface of the water, and especially in the effect of impurities. She began performing experiments as an amateur chemist. In so doing, she pioneered the entire field of surface science describing physical properties of liquids and solids at interfaces, gained international recognition, published a series of peer-reviewed papers and earned an honorary doctoral degree from Braunschweig University, Germany. Performing kitchen-table research, she developed a surface film balance technique to study soap and surfactants at the air-liquid interfaces and defined the Pockels point, the minimum area a single molecule can occupy in a monomolecular film.

Agnes Pockels' first paper 'Surface Tension'
published in Nature in 1891, complete
with Lord Rayleigh's introduction.

Born in Venice in 1862, when it was part of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, Agnes' father Theodor served in the Austrian army. Malaria was an ever-present risk in the region and struck the family. When Theodor fell ill in 1871, he retired and moved the family, his wife Alwine, daughter Agnes and son Friedrich, to Brunswick, in the newly formed German Empire. Agnes was interested in science, and attended the Municipal High School for Girls. Though she would have loved to pursue higher education in science, and especially in physics, women were not admitted to German universities (with a very few notable exceptions). So, she studied science at home, while caring for her parents for three decades, as expected for an unmarried daughter. When her younger brother Friedrich went to study physics at the University of Göttingen, he would share his textbooks with her. Later, he would supply her with research in the academic literature to help her pursue her own self-taught studies. When the universities finally began admitting women, Agnes followed her father's wishes and refrained from attending so she could continue keep house and to care for her sick parents.

She began experiments when she was 18, and by age 20 in 1882, she had devised a slide through for making quantitative measurements of soapy water and other materials. Her water-filled through was 70 cm long, 5 cm wide and 2 cm deep and she laid a metal strip (about 1.5 cm wide) on the water, across the width of the through, so she could divide the surface into two parts. A lengthwise ruler along the through allowed her to precisely measure the surface area of both sides as the strip was moved along the length of the through. Building on the plate method of Ludwig Wilhelmy, she devised a simple but clever means of measuring surface tension in either area with a ceramic button (6 mm in diameter) placed on the surface. She would raise the button with an apothecary's balance or weighing scale to measure the force required to lift it from the water. She could then compare the force required to lift her button from pure water, or water with various added substances and impurities. Using her through, she investigated surface forces of monomolecular films, emulsions, solutions and the effect of impurities on physical properties and she came to understand surfactancy, the property of a chemical compound to decrease surface tension at an interface between different materials (at least one of which is a fluid).  She found that small amounts of impurities could have a large impact on surface tension. 

Agnes Pockels in 1885

Her through influenced future experimentalists in colloidal and surface science who employ the modern Langmuir-Blodgett through, an improved apparatus based on her work, still in use today. When Irving Langmuir won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in the surface chemistry of oil films, he was building on the 18 year old autodidact Agnes Pockels' experiments with a button and thin tray, performed in her kitchen (not that he bothered to mention this in his Nobel lecture). Her sister-in law, Elisabeth Pockels wrote, "every day, millions of housewives were unhappy to see greasy dish water and just wanted to get rid of it, but it inspired this very person to make observations and finally also work on scientific treatises." She made her meticulous investigations for a full decade without any communication or collaboration with the world of academic science. She had tried writing to physicists at the University of Göttingen about her work but received no reply. Then in 1890, her brother sent her a paper on surface phenomena by renown physicist Lord Rayleigh.  With her brother's encouragement, she wrote Rayleigh a modest, 12 page letter, including all her results. She explained that she had been unable to publish her results in any scientific journal and she gave him her permission to use her results if they were at all useful. Rayleigh did not speak German, but luckily, his wife Evelyn could translate the letter for him. He instantly recognized the importance of Agnes' work and to his credit he sent them to Nature, putting the weight of his reputation behind supporting the work of an unknown amateur, writing, "I shall be obliged if you can find space for the accompanying translation of an interesting letter which I have received from a German lady, who with very homely appliances has arrived at valuable results regarding the behaviour of contaminated water surfaces. The earlier part of Miss Pickles' letter covers nearly the same ground as some of my own recent work, and the main harmonises with it. The later sections seem to me very suggestive, raising if they do not fully answer, many important questions. I hope soon to find opportunity for repeating some of Miss Pockels' experiments." Nature published Ages' letter with Rayleigh's cover letter. This paper, 'Surface Tension' is considered a landmark in the history of surface chemistry.

Seeing her research published encouraged her to continue her experiments, and her correspondence with Rayleigh. She wrote to him about the paramount importance of cleanliness in these experiments and her recognition of how contamination had hampered her previous efforts. Even dust could hinder reproducibility. To study monolayer films, she developed a procedure for the deposition of the compound of interest as a solution in benzene on the surface of the water in her trough and she was able to measure layer thickness at 13Å (an Angstrom is a billionth of a metre, roughly the size of a single atom). She published her second paper, with Rayleigh's help, in Nature in 1892. She went on to study forces on monomolecular films, the calming effect various oils can have on water, various liquids and their adhesion on glass and the surface tension of emulsions and solutions, other surface phenomena like capillary and contact angles, publishing her results in scientific journals including Nature, Wissenschaftliche Rundschau, Annalen der Physik, and Science.  She was invited to give public lectures by German universities.  She published subjects beyond surface science, including her translation of Georg Howard Darwin's 'The Tides and Kindred Phenomena in the Solar System' and a philosophy paper in Annalen der Naturaphilosophie. 

German scientists finally took notice. At the Physikalische Institut of Techniche Hochschile Brauschweig (the Physical Institute of the Technical University Brauschweig), crystal physicist Woldemar Voigt (1850-1919) offered her lab facilities, so over the next decade, she squeezed in further research there around her responsibilities at home. 

Soaps are surfactants made of molecules which have a "water loving" hydrophilic head and a water-repelling hydrophobic tail which is insoluble in water and tends to sit on its surface. Using her sliding through, Agnes found the tiny addition of surfactants had a small impact on surface tension until the slider passed a certain point, where tension would suddenly increase. She plotted surface tension versus slider position, showing the compression isotherm. She realized that the point the compression isotherm abruptly changed was when the continuous film of surfactant was a single molecule thick. With further experimentation she found that the threshold point is the same for a variety of surfactants. Knowing the volume of surfactant soap and the surface area covered by the film, she was able to calculate the surface area of the water occupied by a single molecule to be 20 square Angstroms, now known as the Pockels Point.

Early in the new century, in 1902, her parents' worsening health interrupted her work at the university and she became their full-time carer. Her father died in 1906, her brother died in 1913 and her mother died in 1914. She herself was in quite poor health and she needed to have a stay in a sanitarium. Then during the first world war, she lost contact with the scientific community. Germany was isolated and she was unable to access the foreign scientific literature. Her health and eyesight deteriorated. She had invested wisely and was more financially insulated than other Germans from the post-war financial chaos. She felt the responsibility to protect those around her from the threat of hunger and homelessness and she stopped carrying out her experiments. She published the last of her 14 papers, reviewing her classic work, in 1926. She spent her later years travelling in Europe and as the devoted Auntie Agnes to her brother's children. She finally received public recognition for her work, winning the Laura R. Leonard Prize of the Colloid Society in 1931. In 1932, Techniche Hochschile Brauschweig granted her an honorary doctorate in engineering. She was the first woman to receive such an award. Legendary German colloid chemist Wolfgang Ostwald published her biography on her 70th birthday in 1832. Her sister-in-law Elisabeth Pockels also wrote a biography of Agnes, focusing on her personal life. Since 1993 the university has granted the Agnes Pockels Medal to people who have made outstanding contributions to the development of the university, promoting research and teaching, particularly by women. In 2002 Techniche Hochschile Brauschweig established the Agnes Pockels Laboratory to foster chemical education and aid chemistry teachers, focusing on children under 10, especially girls.

Despite her limited access to education Agnes Pockels found wonder in a mundane tub of dishwater, and launched an entirely new field of science.

References

Agnes Pockels, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2026

DeBakcsy, Dale. How a Kitchen Experiment Spawned a New Science: The Surface Physics of Agnes Pockels. The Women in Science Archive. October 16, 2023.

Derrick, M. Elizabeth. Agnes Pockels, 1862-1935, Journal of Chemical Education, vol. 59, no, 12, pp. 1030-1031, December 1982

Gratzer, Walter (ed.). A Beside Nature - Genius and Eccentricity in Science 1869-1953. W.H. Freeman and Company, New York. pp. 88. 1999.

Kruse, Andrea and Sonja M. Schwarzl. "Zum Beispiel Agnes Pockels," Nachrichten aus der Chemie, 06, 2002, translated as "Who was Agnes Pockels - Agnes Pockels - Housewife and Chemist", Braunschweig Technical University, accessed January, 2026.

RAYLEIGH Surface Tension. Nature 43, 437–439 (1891). https://doi.org/10.1038/043437c0

Mathematician Olga Ladyzhenskaya, Turbulent History, Fluid Dynamics and Partial Differential Equations

Olga Ladyzhenskaya, linocut print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2026

For the 6th #PrinterSolstice prompt 'expression' I chose Olga Ladyzhenskaya, a mathematician who overcame personal tragedy, faced Soviet totalitarianism and the catastrophic political upheaval of the 20th century to make a huge impact on the math, making important contributions to study of partial differential equations and left a legacy of influence on a school of students and collaborators in this field. She changed the very way partial differential equations are examined and was one of the leading figures to popularize the notion of weak solutions (which satisfy the equations but may not be differentiable) for partial differential equations. Expressions included in my portrait are for the Navier-Stokes equation, quoted directly from her 1958 paper on the subject*. She was known for her courage, kindness and integrity as well as her indelible mark on mathematics.

Born in the wild woods in Kologriv, a small, remote town on northwest of Moscow, Olga Ladyzhenskaya (1922-2004) and her older sisters were taught mathematics by their math teacher father Aleksandr Ivanovich Ladýzhenski. He would formulate a theorem and ask his daughters to prove it, a technique which fostered Olga's mathematical intuition. Olga showed the most promise amongst her sisters and soon she and her father were working on calculus together. His family had descended from nobility, and it was not a good time to be either an intellectual, or descendent from nobility, in the USSR. His uncle, who also lived with the family in Kologriv, was a famous watercolour painter, Gennardy Ladýzhenski. Olga was close with her great-uncle, whom she called "Dedushka" or grandfather, and she carefully preserved his landscape paintings of the River Ounja. Her mother Anna Mikhailovna was originally from a small town in Estonia and was the homemaker. Their home was full of books and the girls were exposed to culture, though they grew up in what felt like the hinterland. Olga had a lifelong love of art and literature. Aleksandr stood up for his students after their parents were arrested by the NKVD (the predecessor of the KGB secret police). In his epic The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn recounted that a peasant warned Aleksandr Ladýzhenski that he was on a list of enemies of the state, but he refused to hide. Shortly thereafter in 1937 he was arrested and executed, likely in a NKVD torture chamber like many other great teachers, declared an "enemy of the people." It was a great shock to his family. Olga's mother and eldest sister managed to support the family through this terrible time. Her mother made dresses, soap and other craft work to earn an income and survive. Olga's older sisters were expelled from school as daughters of Aleksandr. Her father's status, and the resulting impacts on his family, was not rehabilitated until 1956, when Khrushchev delivered the "Secret Speech" at the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party which denounced the Stalin's purges and exonerated the teachers who had been killed. This was a speech which also finally allowed a resumption of communication between mathematicians, across the Iron Curtain. Prior to the speech the two groups were working in isolation of each other. Olga had been tackling the some of the most difficult equations of mathematical physics without the benefit of knowing about progress made in the West.

Despite her excellent grades, when Olga graduated from high school two years later, she was not admitted to Leningrad State University, as the daughter of an "enemy of the people." She was allowed to attend Pokrovski Teachers' Training College in Leningrad. Then during the war years, she was forced to leave Leningrad and she taught at an orphanage at Godorets before returning home to teach at the high school in Kologriv, like her father, as well as in her home. She welcomed all students, regardless of their ability to pay. In thanks for her kindness, a student's mother interceded on her behalf and Olga got an opportunity to study mathematics at Moscow State University. She was awarded a Stalin stipend (despite her family history) and ration card so she could survive as a student, but she was often hungry. Sometimes she had to sleep on the auditorium benches, joking that she was learning through osmosis by using her books as a pillow. 

She wrote a thesis supervised by renown mathematician Ivan Georgievich Petrovskiǐ.  She started studying algebra and number theory and her interest in partial differential equations (PDEs) grew. This is the calculus of multivariable functions, a way to determine the rate of change of a function with respect to one of its variables. This is a branch of mathematics which is invaluable to physics, engineering and other fields which use applied mathematics. It is often impossible to find explicit formulas for solutions for partial differential equations so a lot of modern math and science research goes into finding approximate numerical solutions for PDEs. In pure mathematics, there is research into what we can know qualitatively about the nature of solutions of certain important, but impossible to explicitly solve, PDEs: things like whether solutions exist at all, if so, whether are they unique, whether they are differentiable or smooth, whether solutions are regular or stable. 

After she graduated in 1947, she got married to Alekseevich Kiselev, a specialist in number theory and the history of mathematics who lived in Leningrad. Thus she moved to Leningrad for graduate school, where she taught in the physics department. Though they had a loving marriage, it was brief. She and her husband separated because he wanted children whereas she wanted to devote her life to mathematics and felt that children would be an obstacle. She remained single thereafter. 

Her official supervisor for her thesis on linear and quasilinear hyperbolic systems of partial differential equations was Sergei Sobolev, but unofficially she was guided by Vladimir Smirnov and they became friends. Smirnov was in charge of several branches of mathematics, seismology, hydrodynamics and aerodynamics and she was strongly influenced to study mathematical physics. She defended her PhD in 1951. Two years later, 1953 was an important year for Ladyzhenskya; She published her first book, she also defended her "habilitation" dissertation (the highest university degree awarded in some European nations typically 5 to 15 years after a PhD) and Stalin died, thus things slowly began to change in Russia. She went on to publish six monographs (some as long as 700 pages) and more than 250 papers! 

Ladyzhenskaya and Smirnov started the weekly mathematical physics "Smirnov Seminar," in 1947 and she took over the seminar after his death in 1974. She is remembered for asking just the right questions in seminars, which were revealing for teaching. She organized sporadic very popular conferences of differential equations and their applications.  She was known for her work on partial differential equations and especially her work on whether the solutions to regular problems in the calculus of variations are analytic, which is the 19th of famed mathematician David Hilbert's list of 23 (at the time) unsolved problems. In 1954 she joined the Stekov Institute mathematical physics laboratory and would go on to become its head in 1961. 

By the mid-50s she was working on problems in fluid dynamics, a particularly mathematically-challenging field of physics, and the Navier-Stokes equations for the motion of viscous fluids, in particular. These equations would interest her for the rest of her career. These partial differential equations are vital to modelling everything from the weather, to turbulence, to ocean currents, to flow in a pipe, or in blood vessels or around an airplane wing. Despite having been developed in the 19th century and their importance to such a wide array of science and engineering, to this day, there is much we still do not know about these equations. Turbulence may be common in everyday life but the physics and underlying mathematics remain some of the least understood. Physicists are interested in how the smooth laminar flow say in a river, breaks down when it hits an obstacle causing eddies upon eddies in the flow until we are left with turbulence - and whether we can correctly model that turbulence thereafter. In my portrait I show precisely this: laminar flow lines hitting an obstacle, the ensuing eddies and devolution into turbulence. Mathematicians however still have not even been able to show whether smooth solutions even always exist in three dimensions. We do not even know if the equations will allow us to model fluids with any given initial conditions, indefinitely into the future. This is called the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, deemed one of the seven most important unsolved math problems. The Clay Mathematics Institute is offering a 1 million US dollar Millennium Prize award for a proof or counter-example to the problem. 

In the 1930s, Jean Leray had demonstrated the existence of weak solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations, but it had proved more difficult to show whether solutions were unique, until Olga was able to show both existence and uniqueness. She did this at a time when, as a Soviet mathematician, she was not able to read Leray's work. She was the first to prove the convergence of finite difference methods to solve the Navier-Stokes equations. That means she showed that we can reliably find a solution to the equations of how viscous fluids move by using the very useful trick of approximating derivatives with finite differences. She also analyzed the regularity of solutions under certain conditions for two-dimensional flows. Her resulting monograph of the Navier-Stokes equations ranks amongst the most influential mathematical books ever published. She believed that when flow becomes highly turbulent in 3D systems that the Navier-Stokes equations are insufficient so she present her own modification to the equations at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow in 1966. 

She also analyzed the regularity of other types of partial differential equations, including parabolic equations (Vsevolod A. Solonnikov and her student Nina Ural'tseva) and quasilinear elliptical equations. These two types of equations are invaluable to the physics and engineering of time-dependent and steady-state phenomena, respectively. In the 1960s, these three published a veritable encyclopedia on the subject of the regularity of the solutions of PDEs that remains authoritative today. She published her influential text The Mathematical Theory of Viscous Incompressible Flow in 1961. She dedicated the book to the three people she most respected: her father, Vladimir Ivanovich Smirnov and Jean Leray.  At a time when exchanges between Western and Soviet scientists and mathematicians were virtually non-existent, she extended the results of Ennio De Giorgi, Jurgen Moser and John Nash ( the 1994 Nobel Laureate in Economics). 

Olga Ladyzhenskaya

She taught mathematics throughout her career and was recognized as one of the most significant and influential 20th century mathematicians. She nominated for the 1958 Fields Medal. She was president of the St Petersburg Mathematical Society. She was awarded the 1969 State Prize of the USSR and the Chebyshev Prize of the USSR Academy of Science. She was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Science in 1981, a foreign member of The German Academy of Scientists Leopoldina in 1985, a foreign member of the Academia die Lincei in 1989, a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1990 and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2001. In 1989 Communist rule in the USSR ended, and Olga could travel more freely. She won the Great Gold Lomonosov Medal in 2002. Her name is inscribed in marble on a table at the Science Museum of Boston alongside the other most influential 20th century mathematicians. 

She counted amongst her friends dissent writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, famous for raising awareness of repression and the Gulag prison system in Soviet Russia, and poet Anna Akhmatova, who wrote about the Stalinist terror, was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature and dedicated a poem to her. She loved nature and travelling and was a skilled storyteller. She was once on the city council, and was engaged in her community, often risking her own safety and career to aid people opposed to the Soviet regime. She helped many mathematicians in Leningrad obtain apartments, free of charge, for themselves and their families. She cared deeply, was beloved and known to be full of energy and as a person of integrity, courage, faith, and unafraid to express her viewpoint despite a dangerous political climate. Nonetheless she remained a patriotic Russian and encouraged fellow Russian mathematicians to remain in Russia. She was plagued by eye problems and relied on special pencils to work in later years. She loved the sun and with her vision loss found the dark St Petersburg winters a challenge in later life. She was about to make a trip to Florida, and complete a paper on computational hydrodynamics when she died in her sleep in 2004 at the age of 81.

*The text reads "систему уравнений Навье — Стокса" which means 'a system of Navier-Stokes equations' and also "для функций" which means 'for functions' and "при граничных и начальных

условиях" which means 'under boundary and initial conditions'.

References

Dumbaugh, Della, Panagiota Daskalopoulos, Anatoly Vershik, Lev Kapitanski, Nicolai Reshetikhin, Darya Apushkinskaya, and Alecander Nazarov, The Ties That Bind - Olga Ladyzhenskaya and the 2022 ICM in St. Petersburgh. Notices of the American Mathematical Society. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1090/noti2047. March, 20220.

Friedlander, Susan, Peter Lax, Cathleen Morawetz, Louis Nirenberg, Gregory Seregin, Nina Ural'tseva, and Mark Vishik. Olga Alexandrovna Ladyzhenskaya (1922-2004). Notices of the AMS, Volume 51, Number 11, pp. 1321-1331, December, 2004. 

Goudon, Thierry and Irina Sophia Antipolis. Olga Alexandrovna Ladyzhenskaya. Brèves de Maths - Mathématiques de la planète Terre. April 23, 2013.

O'Connor, J.J. and E.F. Robertson, Olga Alexandrovna Ladyzhenskaya. MacTutor. University of St. Andrews, August, 2005.

Olga Ladyzhenskaya. Wikipedia, accessed January, 2026.

Insect Break: Seven-spotted Ladybettle and the Alfalfa Leafcutting Bee

 Ladybeetle on Blossom, 8" x 8" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2026

The 5th prompt for #PrintmakerSolstice2526 was odd. I decided to veer from my series of women in STEM prints. This was partially because I couldn't think of a good mathematician or scientist choice for the theme that I had not already portrayed, and partially because describing someone as "odd" is not necessarily flattering. Also, one portrait a week is also a fast pace, what with the amount of labour involved carving and printing lino blocks.

So, I thought I would use some of the blocks I made for the Invertefest Anthology. For odd, I chose the seven-spotted ladybeetle (or ladybird or lady bug) on an apple blossom. Both the 7 spots and the 5 petals match are odd numbers of course.

Alfalfa Leafcutting Bee, 9" x 11" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2026

A second print from blocks I made for the Invertefest Anthology is my alfalfa leafcutting bee, cutting a leaf. The alfalfa leafcutting bee (Megachile rotundata) is a solitary bee originally from Europe which has been spread to all continents but Antartica for agriculture. In North America it has become feral and widespread. A prolific pollinator (but not a honey-maker) of alfalfa, amongst other food crops, this little bee cuts telltale half-moon shaped pieces out of leaves with which to line her nest. This hand-printed linocut print is made on 9" x 11" Japanese paper.

Both prints can now be found in my shop.

Marine Biologist, Conservationist and Writer Rachel Carson and The Silent Spring

Rachel Carson, linocut print, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2026

The 4th prompt for #PrinterSolstice2526 is "subtraction" so I thought of a scientist and talented writer who brought the world's attention to what was missing. After publishing the sea trilogy in the 40s and 50s, when marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson (1907-1964) published Silent Spring in 1962 she captured the world's attention to the risks to health and environment posed by pesticides and DDT in particular. What was missing after indiscriminate spraying of DDT, to eliminate agricultural insect pests and for disease prevention, was birdsong. Pesticide overuse was "silencing the birds" and rapidly decreasing their populations. She inspired the creation of grassroots environmental groups which culminated in the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency and ultimately to the US banning DDT for agricultural use in 1972 and a worldwide ban on agricultural use under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants since 2004. 

Rachel Carson

A bookish child fond of animals, marine biologist Rachel Carson was born in 1907, and grew up roaming her family's 65-acre farm near Springdale, Pennsylvania. She was the youngest of Robert and Maria Maclean Carson's three children. Her mother taught her "as a tiny child joy in the out-of-doors and the lore of birds, insects, and residents of streams and ponds." Her favourite stories involved the ocean and she began writing her own by age 8. She published her first story in a children's literary magazine by the age of 10. She attended the small local school till grade ten when she transferred to the high school in Parnassus, where she graduated the top of class. She went to the Pennsylvania College for Women in Pittsburgh (now Chatham University) where she majored in English but transferred to biology and wrote for the school newspaper and literary supplement. She was admitted to grad school at Johns Hopkins in 1928 but remained at the Pennsylvania College for Women for financial reasons, where she graduated magna cum laude in 1929. She then went to a summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. It was her first sight of the ocean. She then proceeded to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore to study zoology and genetics in the fall. Money was tight and after her first year, she switched to part time studies so she could earn money working with rats and Drosophila as an assistant in Robert Pearl's lab. She tried research projects working with pit vipers, then squirrels but finally settled on the embryonic development of the urinary organ in fish, earning her master's in 1932. She planned to continue and complete her doctorate but was forced to leave Johns Hopkins in 1934 and earn an income as a teacher to help support her family during the Depression. Then in 1935 her father died suddenly, compounding their financial straights. Rachel had to care for her mother. 

Her undergraduate mentor Mary Scott Skinner encouraged Rachel to take a temporary position with the US Bureau of Fisheries, writing weekly radio copy for educational broadcasts called Romance Under the Waters. The Bureau had been trying, and failing, to generate interest in fish biology and their role, but Rachel proved more successful. Rachel submitted work on marine life in Chesapeake Bay based on her own research to both the show and to local newspapers and magazines. She further supplemented her income lecturing at the University of Maryland's Dental and Pharmacy schools as well as at Johns Hopkins. Her boss at the Bureau invited her to write a public brochure about their work and tried to find her a full-time position. She aced the civil service exam, outscoring all other applicants, and became the second woman to get a full position with the Bureau of Fisheries, as junior aquatic biologist. 

Detail of colour print magazine ad
for Pennsalt DDT products.
This ad appeared in Time Magazine,
 June 30, 1947.

Using her own research and by interviewing colleagues she published a string of articles for the public in the Baltimore Sun and other newspapers. Then in 1937, her older sister died, leaving her the sole bread earner for her mother and two nieces, and she had to take on more family duties. Her supervisor deemed her draft of a brochure too good and too poetic for that purpose and with his encouragement she revised it and published it as Undersea, a vivid tale of a journey to the seafloor, in the Atlantic Monthly. Her lyrical writing drew the reader in. She wrote, "Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere." It caught the attention of Simon & Schuster who suggested she expand the essay into a book. She published the result, Under the Sea Wind in 1941 to critical acclaim but poor sales. Meanwhile she published many articles with Sun Magazine, Nature and Collier's. 

By 1945, she wanted to leave the Bureau, by then known as the US Fish and Wildlife Service, but there were few science jobs for naturalists. She had risen through the ranks and was supervising a small writing staff. That year she learned of Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), grandly described as the "insect bomb" after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, initially intended to protect soldiers from insect-borne malaria. It was beginning tests for safety and ecological effects. DDT was lauded as a miracle for warding off disease and maximizing crop yields, though some were concerned about unintended potential impacts. Swiss chemist Paul Herman Müller, who discovered its insecticidal action in 1939 was rewarded with the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Rachel was interested in writing about it but editors found pesticides an unappealing subject. She gathered a large file but did not manage to publish on the subject until 1962. By 1948 she was working on a second book and hoping to become a full-time writer; she took on literary agent Marie Rodell with whom she shared a close working relationship for the rest of her career. Studies in 1949 found DDT had made its way into the milk supply and newspapers noted that the "slow insidious poison" was built up in the body. That year she was promoted to chief editor of publications which allowed her more freedom to choose projects and do fieldwork but also required much more administration. 

Oxford University Press was interested in her proposed life history of the ocean and she submitted her manuscript of The Sea Around Us in 1950. She published chapters in Science Digest, and The Yale Review, where "The Birth of an Island" won the American Association for the Advancement of Science's George Westinghouse Science Writing Prize. In 1951 she serialized 9 chapters in The New Yorker and published the full book with OUP. It remained on the New York Times Bestseller List for 86 weeks, 39 of those weeks in first place, was abridged in Reader's Digest, won the 1952 National Book Award for Nonfiction, the Gold Medal for the New York Zoological Society and the John Burrows Medal for natural history writing. She was awarded two honorary doctorates, and a Guggenheim science writing grant and was finally able to leave her government job to write full time. She indulged herself by purchasing a very fine binocular microscope, like she had always wanted and moved to Southport Island, Maine.

Irvin Allen wrote a script for a documentary called The Sea based on and licensed from The Sea Around Us. Carson's right to review the script did not actually allow her to request revisions and she found it inconsistent, scientifically embarrassing, untrue to the tone of her book and "a cross between a believe-it-or-not and a breezy travelogue." Allen did not take her advice and nonetheless produced a very successful film which won the 1953 Academy Award for Best Documentary. Carson was so frustrated by errors in the film she never again sold the film rights to her writing.  Nonetheless, the film's success resulted in the reissue of Under the Sea Wind, and it too became a bestseller. 

That summer she began the defining relationship of her life when she met a soul mate, in kindred spirit and nature lover Dorothy M. Freeman, a summer resident of Maine. They spent their summers together when in Maine and exchanged about 900 letters when apart. The surviving letters were published posthumously in Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964: An Intimate Portrait of a Remarkable Friendship (1995) by Freeman's granddaughter Martha Freeman. Dorothy shared parts of their letters with her husband to explain their relationship, but carefully guarded others. It seems likely this was a chaste but romantic relationship. Carson wrote Freeman, "But, oh darling, I want to be with you so terribly that it hurts!" and Freeman wrote to Carson, "I love you beyond expression... My love is as boundless as the Sea." Freeman was devoted, accepted Carson wholly and was a much needed listener. They destroyed hundreds of their letters shortly before Carson's death. 

She completed her third book in the sea trilogy, The Edge of the Sea, about coastal ecosystems, especially those she studied on the Eastern seaboard, in 1955. She documented the well recognized fact of climate change and its impact on the ocean but mainly she celebrated ocean life. She published it in two instalments in The New Yorker and as a book with Houghton Mifflin, to good reviews. She wrote an episode of an educational variety television show called Omnibus called "Something About the Sky" and several magazine articles. She planned a book on evolution but opted to veer instead towards writing about conservation. She became involved with The Nature Conservancy, and bought property in Maine to save it from development. She and Dorothy called it the "Lost Woods." Then, in 1957 tragically, one of the nieces she had cared for since the 40s died at age 31, leaving her 5 year old son Roger Christie an orphan. Rachel adopted Roger, and moved to Silver Spring Maryland to care for her grandnephew along with her aging mother. 

Her research for writing became focused on environmental issues and she closely followed federal plans for widespread pesticide spraying by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to eradicate fire ants and spongy moths (also known as gypsy moths).  DDT mixed with fuel oils was sprayed to kill the spongy moths, including on private land. Landowners on Long Island sued, unsuccessfully, to have the spraying stopped, but the Supreme Court did grant petitioners the right to gain injections against potential environmental damage in the future, a right which has since been used successfully.  The Audubon Naturalist Society also objected and commissioned Carson to help them publicize the government's actions and the related research on the effects of DDT. This became a four year project. First she tried to enlist other writers or co-write with Newsweek science journalist Edwin Diamond, planning only to write the introduction and conclusion. But when The New Yorker commissioned a long, well-paid article she decided to adapt this to a solo writing project. The resulting book, warning of the dangers of indiscriminate pesticide use, Silent Spring, published in hardcover in 1962 and softcover in 1964, was her most influential book. Her scientific expertise, ability to synthesize and articulately explain disparate existing studies along with her clear, griping yet poetic writing allowed her to draw the attention of a much wider audience to the dangers of DDT use. In 2012, the American Chemical Society made Silent Spring a National Historic Chemical Landmark for its role in spurring the modern environmental movement.

She found many scientists were documenting both health and environmental impacts of DDT use and tapped her network of government scientists to get access to confidential data. She found scientists were divided into those who dismissed the cause for concern about pesticides without conclusive data and those who did not and advocated investigating tools other than pesticides like biological pest control. A group of biodynamic agriculture organic market gardeners, advised by soil scientist Dr. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer had had a suite of legal actions against the government over pesticide use, and shared their compiled evidence and trial transcripts with Carson. In 1959, the USDA's Agricultural Research Service made a public service film called "Fire Ants on Trial" which Carson called "flagrant propaganda." She wrote a letter to the Washington Post about the decline in and "silencing of the birds" due to pesticide use. Meanwhile, the 1957, 1958, and 1959 US cranberry crops were found to be high in the herbicide aminotriazole (a known carcinogen in rats) and the sale of crops were halted in what was known as the "Great Cranberry Scandal." Carson attended the resulting FDA hearing on revising pesticide regulations and was upset to hear aggressive testimony by chemical industry representatives which she knew did not represent the consensus in the scientific literature and worried about financial inducements behind pesticide plans. On the health front, she found that many pesticides had been shown to be carcinogens by the National Cancer Institute and researcher and environmental cancer section founding director Wilhelm Hueper. Carson found the evidence clear and convincing though still controversial outside the community studying pesticide carcinogenesis. She also documented hundreds of individual pesticide exposures and resulting illnesses and ecological damage. 

In 1960 a duodenal ulcer kept her bedridden for weeks, and then she discovered a cyst in her left breast and had to have a mastectomy, described as merely precautionary. By December, she had found her tumour was malignant and had metastasized. Her health slowed her revisions, but she chose to hide her condition, fearing chemical companies would use her cancer to argue she was biased. She knew that her book would face push-back. It called into question the post-WWII paradigm of American scientific progress. It made the case that pesticides are in fact more broadly biocides whose effects negatively impact health and environment, often through bioaccumulation, beyond their effect on target insects. Further, she was accusing the chemical industry of spreading disinformation and the government of accepting their claims unquestioningly. She warned that target pests would develop resistance and weakened ecosystems would be at risk to invasive species. She made the case for biotic controls and alternatives to chemical pesticides, but did not call for an outright DDT ban, acknowledging the risks of insect-borne diseases. She quoted Holland's Plant Protection Services which advocated spraying as little as possible rather than to the limit of capacity. She and her agent tried to gather as much advanced support for the book as possible, knowing she would be undergoing radiation therapy and not have the energy to defend her work. They provided copies to attendees of the 1962 White House Conference on Conservation and Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas who had argued against the court's rejection of the Long Island pesticide case. Interest spiked when she serialized the work in The New Yorker and when it was selected as the Book for the Month for October (complete with endorsement from William O. Douglas). Positive editorials started to come out. 

She had caught the chemical industry and their lobbyists' attention. Attacks were swift, personal and gendered. She was called a "spinster," a "bird and bunny lover" and a "woman out of control." Dupont collected a report on press for the book. Monsanto published an apocalyptic parody of her warning, The Desolate Year, in which farmers are unable to feed the populace without pesticides and herbicides, and people would die of preventable diseases, mocking her poetic style. Velsicol Chemical Corporation threatened legal action against her publisher Houghton Mifflin, The New Yorker and Audubon unless they cancelled the book and features. They put out their own brochures arguing for pesticides, which only succeeded in raising public awareness of the controversy and eventually to accidentally leading to increased book sales. Luckily, Carson and colleagues were confident in how carefully the book had been vetted and they proceeded as planned with publication. American Cyanamid biochemist Robert White-Stevens claimed, "If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth" and called her the "fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature." Former US Secretary of Agriculture Benson told Eisenhower that, as an unmarried woman despite being attractive, she was "probably a Communist." Critiques wrongly insisted she was calling for an absolute pesticide ban, rather than responsible and limited use, but academic researchers defended her work and the public was swayed in her favour. CBS Reports hosted a TV special called The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson, where she read calmly from her book and it was her loud insistent critics who were perceived to be the alarmists, not her. She faced this expected backlash with courage, feeling it was her duty and knowing she "could never again listen happily to a thrush song if I had not done all I could." This resulted in a congressional review of pesticide use and dangers and a report from President Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee. 

Testifying for the Committee was one of her last public appearances; their May 15, 1963 report largely backed Carson's claims. She was able to testify to a US Senate subcommittee on policy recommendations, despite debilitating pain, and to appear on The Today Show, but had to decline most invitations to speak due to deteriorating health. She received several awards including the Audubon Medal, the American Geographic Society Cullum Geographical Medal and an induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Breast cancer and its treatment had weakened her. She became ill with a respiratory virus in January, 1964. By February she was diagnosed with anemia from the radiation. By March her cancer had reached her liver. In April, she died of a heart attack at home.  

After Carson's death her brother Robert insisted her ashes be buried next to their mother in Maryland, but Carson had wanted to be buried in Maine. As a compromise, he split her ashes, and sent half to Dorothy Freeman, her agent Marie Rodell and editor Paul Brooks to follow Carson's final wishes. Dorothy was able to spread her ashes in Sheepscot Bay, Maine, by her beloved sea, as Rachel had wished. Rodell was able to usher her essay The Sense of Wonder, into publication as a posthumous book illustrated with photographs, which encourages parents to introduce their children to the "...lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world... available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea, and sky and their amazing life." Biographer Linda Lear also edited the posthumous book of her unpublished writings as Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson. 

Silent Spring electrified the fledgeling environmental movement and influenced the rise of ecofeminism. She brought the public's attention to the fragility and interconnectedness of nature, which includes us. The Environmental Defense Fund was formed in 1967 to argue a "citizen's right to a clean environment" and with others, secured a phase-out of DDT except in emergency situations within the US, by 1972. Carson had highlighted the conflict of interest between the USDA representing the agricultural industry and regulating pesticide use without being responsible for environmental impacts. This changed in 1970 when the Environmental Protection Agency was formed and its early work, enforcing the 1972 Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, could be traced to Carson's influence. Government regulations had previously only extolled the effectiveness of pesticides without also considering environmental impact and this change can be tied to the effectiveness of Carson's message. Her impact was seen in popular culture; in 1970's Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell was inspired by Silent Spring when she wrote the lyrics "Hey farmer - put away the DDT. Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and bees. Please!" She had become the most celebrated science writer of her generation. She was inducted in to the Women's Hall of Fame in 1973. She posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980. Many schools, buildings, awards, colleges, societies, research vessels and conservation areas have been named in her honour. May we remember her and heed her advice that, "Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction." Science must be moored to morality, ethics and attention to its impacts, both planned and unforeseen. 

References

Carty, Ryan. Loud and Clear. Chemical Heritage, Summer 2012.

Conis, Elena. Beyond Silent Spring: An Alternate History of DDT, Distillations Magazine, Science History Institute Museum & Library. February 14, 2017.

DDT, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2026.

Leonard, Jonathan Norton. Rachel Carson Dies of Cancer; 'Silent Spring' Author Was 56, Obituary, New York Times, April 15, 1964.

Michals, Debra. Rachel Carson. National Women's History Museum. 2015.

Popova, Maria. The Story Behind "Silent Spring": How Rachel Carson's Countercultural Courage Catalyzed the Environmental Movement, The Marginalia, January 27, 2017.

Popova, Maria. Undersea: Rachel Carson's Lyrical and Revolutionary 1937 Masterpiece Inviting Humans to Explore the Earth from the Perspective of Other Creatures, The Marginalia, January 27, 2017.

Rachel Carson, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2026.

Silent Spring, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2026.