Aeronautical Engineer and Queen of the Hurricanes, Elsie MacGill for Ada Lovelace Day

Elsie MacGill, linocut print, 9.25" x 12.5" on Japanese paper by Ele Willoughby, 2025

 

It is once again Ada Lovelace Day, the 16th annual international day of blogging to celebrate the 

Ada, Countess Lovelace, 3rd edition linocut by Ele Willoughby 

achievements of women in technology, science and math, Ada Lovelace Day 2025 (ALD25). I'm sure you'll all recall, Ada, brilliant proto-software engineer, daughter of absentee father, the mad, bad, and dangerous to know, Lord Byron, she was able to describe and conceptualize software for Charles Babbage's computing engine, before the concepts of software, hardware, or even Babbage's own machine existed! She foresaw that computers would be useful for more than mere number-crunching. For this she is rightly recognized as visionary - at least by those of us who know who she was. She figured out how to compute Bernouilli numbers with a Babbage analytical engine. Tragically, she died at only 36. Today, in Ada's name, people around the world are blogging.

 

You can find my previous Ada Lovelace Day posts here.

I am working on a new woman in STEM portrait for ALD25 and an upcoming #Spacetober print, but sometimes life gets in the way. We had a family emergency this week, so I am quite behind. But I want to share what I can, so read on to find my yearly - if a bit shortened - biography of aeronautical engineer Elsie MacGill (March 27, 1905 – November 4, 1980). Elizabeth Muriel "Elsie" Gregory MacGill was born in Vancouver, in 1905, and became the first woman aeronautical engineer and professional aircraft designer in North America, and likely the world. She was the first and, usually, only woman through her education at four different universities and engineering departments. She collaborated on many of Canada's famous and innovative bush planes and aircraft components, was entirely responsible for Canada's Maple Leaf Trainer II, a military flight trainer aircraft, and most famously, as chief aeronautical engineer at Canadian Car and Foundry (CC&F) in Fort William, Ontario (now Thunder Bay), she oversaw the manufacturing of 1,451 Hawker Hurricane fighter aircraft during WWII for the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) and the British Royal Air Force (RAF), as well as 835 Curtiss Helldivers for the US Navy, becoming known as "The Queen of the Hurricanes." Her work helped make Canada a powerhouse of aircraft manufacturing. Later, she served as a Commissioner of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada, which published their report in 1970. Elsie came by her aptitude for social justice and blazing her own trail honestly. Her mother Helen MacGill was a suffragette like her mother before her, a journalist, a judge and a leader in Canada's women's movement. Her father James Henry MacGill, was a prominent Vancouver lawyer, part-time journalist, and Anglican deacon and supporter of women's suffrage. Elsie grew up with two older step-brothers and an older sister. Early home-schooling including drawing lessons with renown Canadian artist Emily Carr and swimming lessons with prominent lifeguard Joe Fortes. Then she attended King George Secondary, associated with McGill University, before entering UBC Applied Science, but the dean asked her to leave after one term. She moved on to the University of Toronto, where, she wrote, "My presence in the University of Toronto's engineering classes in 1923 certainly turned a few heads." She spent her summers working in machine shops, where she gained practical hands on skills to go with the classroom theory, and where she was exposed to aeronautical engineering. When Elsie graduated from the University of Toronto in 1927, she was the first woman electrical engineer in Canada. She got a junior job with Austin Aircraft Company in Pontiac, Michigan and began part-time graduate studies, then enrolling full-time at the University of Michigan. Two years later, she graduated from the University of Michigan, as the first woman with a master's in aeronautical engineering, anywhere. Just prior to completing her master's she fell ill with polio and found herself paralyzed from the waist down. She spent much of the subsequent three years in bed or relying on a wheelchair, told she would never walk again. She nevertheless fought to regain her mobility and taught herself to walk again using two canes. She treated her disability as a mere inconvenience. She continued to pursue her doctorate from MIT from 1932-1934, supplementing her income with writing magazine articles about aircraft and flying. At MIT she was finally not the lone woman, as a contemporary of aeronautical engineer and technical writer, M. Elsa Gardner. Upon graduating she returned to Canada, taking a job as assistant aeronautical engineer at Fairfield Aircraft in Longueuil, Quebec. There, she worked on the Fairchild Super 71(the first aircraft designed and built in Canada featuring a metal fuselage), the Fairchild 82 (a bush plane), and the Fairchild Sekani(twin-engined transport aircraft) and presented her paper, "Simplified Performance Calculations for Aeroplanes", to the Royal Aeronautical Society in Ottawa, on March 22, 1938, which was later published in The Engineering Journal. She took part in the CBC's six-part series 

The Engineer in War Time in a segment called "Aircraft Engineering in Wartime Canada."  In 1938 she was also first woman elected to corporate membership in the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC).

In 1942, she was hired as Chief Aeronautical Engineer at Canadian Car and Foundry (CanCar, or CC&F), where she designed a training aircraft, and oversaw its production: the Maple Leaf Trainer II. It did not end up being used by Commonwealth forces, but Mexico purchased ten of them because of their excellent high-altitude performance. Then, the company was selected to manufacture Hawker Hurricanes for the RAF. She became responsible for increasing the workforce from 500 to 4,500 mainly women workers and the tooling of 25,000 precision parts which had to be interchangeable with the British made Hawker Hurricanes, and streamline the mass production of these aeroplanes. This involved designing the manufacturing tools and adaptations to the plane, including de-icing controls and landing skis, for use during Canadian winters. She wrote and presented a paper about the experience, "Factors Affecting Mass Production of Aeroplanes", later published in The Engineering Journal. It won the Gzowski Medal from the Engineering Institute of Canada in 1941. The work made her famous and she even appeared in a comic book biography in an issue of True Comics in 1942, using her nickname, "Queen of the Hurricanes”.

Seeking a job to replace the Hurricanes, CC&F in 1943, they were awarded a contract from the US Navy for the SB2C Helldiver. Production did not go smoothly; MacGill and CC&F were foiled by repeated changes in specifications making mass production all but impossible. The US Navy, frustrated with delays fired MacGill and line production manager Bill Soulsby, rather than figure out the source of the problem. Soulsby and MacGill got married two weeks later.

The couple moved to Toronto and set up a consulting firm. MacGill wrote the International Air Worthiness regulations for the design and production of commercial aircraft, as a Technical Advisor to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). These regulations, with their updates, are still important to safety of commercial aircraft.  She became the first woman to chair a U.N. committee, in 1947 as chairman of the United Nations Stress Analysis Committee. MacGill presented her paper "The Initiative in Airliner Design", to the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and subsequently published it in The Engineering Journal. The next year the SWE awarded her their annual Achievement Award. 

While recovering from a broken leg, in 1953, she sorted through her mother's papers. This in turn lead to writing her biography, My Mother, the Judge: A Biography of Judge Helen Gregory MacGill, which she published in 1955.

She followed her mother's example and worked on women's issues, serving as national president of the Canadian Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs from 1962 to 1964. Prime Minister Lester Pearson appointed her to the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada and she is a co-author of their 1970 report. She filed a "Separate Statement" so she could voice her opinions which differed from the majority on the commission, including her belief that abortion should be removed from the entirety of the Criminal Code. Abortion had become legal in 1969, through the Criminal Law Amendment Act, but only if a 3-doctor committee determined that the pregnancy posed a danger to the parent's health. In 1988, the Supreme Court agreed with MacGill, striking down the remaining Criminal Code provisions restricting abortion as unconstitutional; abortion is healthcare. MacGill was also a member of the Ontario Status of Women Committee, an affiliate of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. This work along with her engineering career earned her the Order of Canada in 1971. She wrote, "I have received many engineering awards, but I hope I will also be remembered as an advocate for the rights of women and children."

She was granted honorary doctorates in law from the University of Toronto in 1973, and in science from the University of Windsor in 1976. The Ninety-Nines: International Organization of Women Pilots, awarded her the Amelia Earhart Medal in 1975. In 1977 she received the Queen's Silver Jubilee Medal. In 1979, the Ontario Association of Professional Engineers presented her with their gold medal. She was inducted in the Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame in 1983 and she was a a founding inductee in the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame in 1992. She has been honoured with a stamp, a commemorative loonie dollar coin, schools and cadet squadrons have been named in her honour and she was a subject of a Heritage Minute for her work during WWII.

References

Bourgeois-Doyle, Dick. QUEEN OF THE HURRICANES — The Elsie MacGill Story, Vintage Wings of Canada, accessed October, 2025

Queen of the Hurricanes Engineer Elsie MacGill, Canadians At Arms, accessed October, 2025

Elsie MacGill, Wikipedia, accessed October, 2025

Schiedel, Bonnie. Soaring High - Elsie MacGill was the world’s first female aeronautical engineer. Canada's History, February-March, 2025.

Seismologist Inge Lehmann for Ada Lovelace Day

Inge Lehmann, linocut on Japanese washi, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby

Today is the 9th annual international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology, science and math, Ada Lovelace Day 2017 (ALD17). I'm sure you'll all recall, Ada, brilliant proto-software engineer, daughter of absentee father, the mad, bad, and dangerous to know, Lord Byron, she was able to describe and conceptualize software for Charles Babbage's computing engine, before the concepts of software, hardware, or even Babbage's own machine existed! She foresaw that computers would be useful for more than mere number-crunching. For this she is rightly recognized as visionary - at least by those of us who know who she was. She figured out how to compute Bernouilli numbers with a Babbage analytical engine. Tragically, she died at only 36. Today, in Ada's name, people around the world are blogging about women in STEM.

You can find my previous Ada Lovelace Day posts here. 

This year, to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day (ALD17), I'm writing about a great a Danish (or, as she put it the only Danish) seismologist who was at the forefront of the field in the early twentieth century, the one and only Inge Lehmann (1888-1993). She was a pioneer woman in science, a brilliant seismologist and lived to be 104. In 1936 she wrote an earth-shattering paper, with an astonishingly succinct title: P' in which she laid out her arguments supporting her discovery of the inner core of the earth.

We now know, as she first postulated, that the earth has roughly three equal concentric sections: mantle, liquid outer core and solid inner core. The crust, on which we live is merely a thin, um, scum really, on top of this slowly boiling pot. The only way to probe deep into the earth's core is to employ massive earthquakes, the waves they generate and the paths they follow. There are two main types of seismic waves used for studies of the globe, unimaginatively named Primary (or P, which are known as pressure waves or compressional waves) and Secondary (or S, which are shear waves). “P is used to denote longitudinal or ‘pressure’ seismic waves. Those that travel in the Earth’s mantle and crust only are represented by P; P’ represents P-waves that pass through the mantle into the core, and then pass through the mantle again,” she explained. The paths these waves can follow through the Earth depend on their nature, and the materials through which they travel.

Even if you don't regularly think about waves, you will be familiar with a type of compressional wave, namely sound. Read this aloud and the air molecules between your mouth and the ears of any listener (including your own) will compress and rarefy in a wave pattern as the sound is transmitted. Shear waves are different, and as the name implies, they are excited by a shearing motion (like you make with scissors, also known as shears). I can't describe a shear wave in air, or any other fluid, for the same reason you can't cut air with your scissors: fluids do not support shear.

Lehmann's 1936 paper presented this (simplified) three-shell model of the Earth.
She argued that P-waves recorded within the shadow zone are caused by
their interaction with a solid inner core. Today we know that in reality,
seismic waves curve as they travel through the layers of Earth.
Credit: Kathleen Cantner, AGI, based on Lehmann’s original figure, redrawn in 2001.

Imagine a glass of water with a straw; the straw will appear broken at the air-water interface, because light bends as it enters the water. Just like light travelling through different media, these seismic waves can bend, reflect or be transmitted at any boundary. The difference in physical properties between the mantle and outer core causes a P-wave shadow, due to diffractions at the boundary (like in the straw in water analogy). For S-waves, the shadow zone is absolute because liquids, like the outer core, do not support shear. Thus, no shear waves can make it through the outer core, and thus we can be certain the outer core is fluid. The faster moving compressional waves can move through fluids, but they refract at the boundary, which causes the shadow zone for seismic stations beyond 105° from an epicentre. Lehmann found that there were some late-arriving P-waves are much larger angles (142° to 180°) which had been vaguely labelled 'diffractions' (shown in orange on the diagram). These were P' waves which had travelled right through the Earth's core, then out through the mantle again to the other side. Some appeared stronger amplitude than expected (red lines, between the two shadow zones). There were also waves inexplicably arriving within the P-wave shadow, where no one expected compressional waves to arrive. She showed that these could be explained instead by deflections of the waves which travelled through the outer core at her postulated inner core boundary. These weird P' waves could only be explained by if there was another interface within the core, between an outer fluid core and an inner solid core!

Modern depiction of the Lehmann discontinuity where there's a
kink in the speed of mantle P waves for three different settings -
TNA = Tectonic North America, SNA = Shield North America
and ATL = North Atlantic. [*]

She later discovered a discontinuity in the mantle (confusingly also called the Lehmann discontinuity). She did important work well into her 70s and lived to be 105.

When she received the Bowie medal in 1971 (she was the first woman to receive the highest honour of the American Geophysical Union), her citation noted that the "Lehmann discontinuity was discovered through exacting scrutiny of seismic records by a master of a black art for which no amount of computerization is likely to be a complete substitute..." (*).

I think her accomplishments are downright astonishing. To have the exactitude to work with the data and the daring to neglect the irrelevant and offer up a simple, elegant - correct! - explanation is a rare and marvellous thing. To be the top of her field in 1936, when she was a pioneer for women in science and had to "compete in vain with incompetent men" (her words *) is heroic.

You can find my portrait of Inge Lehmann here. Both Lehmann and Ada, Countess Lovelace are among the portaits I contributed to the Phylo Women in STEM trading cards (which can be found at the link). The set can be downloaded and printed for free or you can purchase your own set as illustrated.

There are a grand total of three easily found photographs of Lehmann I was able to find on the internet. I based my portrait one of the earlier ones, to match the date of her phenomenal P' paper. I also show her model of the earth (as she herself presented it in 1936) in red-orange ink, complete with mantle, inner and outer core, and travel paths for rays through the layers, including into the shadow zone. One of the great geophysicists - one of the great scientists of the 20th century, Inge Lehmann should be remembered.

Go Ahead and Do It

 

If you are in the Austin, TX area be sure to visit Art.Science.Gallery! I am really excited to take part in their show of portraits of women in science, technology, engineering, and math, which begins this weekend. It's called Go Ahead and Do It and I wish I could be there to see it. If you are able to go, let me know and then tell me all about it!

"The pioneers portrayed in this collection offer an encouraging look at what women can achieve in the STEM fields despite persistent obstacles. “If it’s a good idea,” computer scientist and U.S. Rear Admiral Grace Hopper once quipped, “go ahead and do it.” A portion of the proceeds from this exhibition benefit GirlStart, a non-profit that provides opportunities for girls to become involved in STEM fields."

Opening Reception Saturday September 13, 2014 7-10pm
Images of Women in Science Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon Monday October 13, 2014 6-9pm
Ada Lovelace Day Party Tuesday October 14 6-9pm featuring a brief talk by guest curator Maia Weinstock at 6:30pm

Mary Anning, Great Fossil Hunter & Paleontology Pioneer for Ada Lovelace Day

Today is the fifth annual international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology, science and math, Ada Lovelace Day 2013 (ALD13). I'm sure you'll all recall, Ada, brilliant proto-software engineer, daughter of absentee father, the mad, bad, and dangerous to know, Lord Byron, she was able to describe and conceptualize software for Charles Babbage's computing engine, before the concepts of software, hardware, or even Babbage's own machine existed! She foresaw that computers would be useful for more than mere number-crunching. For this she is rightly recognized as visionary - at least by those of us who know who she was. She figured out how to compute Bernouilli numbers with a Babbage analytical engine. Tragically, she died at only 36. Today, in Ada's name, people around the world are blogging 

I've been thinking for a while about whom I would like to portray, in a new print, and write about for Ada Lovelace Day. Emmy Noether has been on my 'to do' list for a while.  When I was taught Noether's Theorem, which related symmetries to conservation laws, I was absolutely flabbergasted. It's one of the most profound ideas in physics (and hence a pretty fundamental aspect of the universe as we know it). It's downright astounding that she isn't a household name (and remember, we do know the names of many male theoreticians even if an understanding of their work is uncommon). I experienced one of those - perhaps transcendental - flashes of insight where I suddenly 'saw' how the theorem was true. I think those moments actual explain why many people choose to be scientists; there's nothing like it. I don't know that I can explain it fully and I'm not sure I can explain the beauty of Noether's Theorem without spontaneously trying to teach anyone willing to listen a term of classical mechanics. I definitely do not know how to convey its meaning in a portrait... though as you can see from my portrait of Lady Ada Lovelace that I am willing to carve actual equations (in reverse, no less!) to show what a person accomplished, but the fact is that even if you do not understand the computation of Bernouilli numbers the meaning of the print is conveyed; Ada showed how the calculations could be done mechanically, on Charles Babbage's wondrous computing engine. To really let anyone understand Noether's tremendous accomplishment, I would need to make Noether's Theorem transparent... though I'm sure most artists would not feel constrained by this requirement. As I've yet to figure out how to do so, I wanted to select someone's whose achievements were more accessible and obvious to understand.

Mary Anning (21 May 1799 – 9 March 1847) was the wrong class, the wrong sex and even the wrong religious denomination to gain the education, opportunity to work and communicate her results or to garner any respect as a pioneering paleontologist. Further, during her lifetime most people in Britain and elsewhere thought the Earth was a mere few thousand years old, based on a very literal interpretation of the Bible and found the idea of extinction did not fit in with the story of creation. Yet, her fossil discoveries, meticulous collection, documentation and independent work to fully understand the anatomy of the amazing Jurassic creatures she encountered in famed Blue Lias cliffs of Lyme Regis, Dorset, England, were so undeniable that she gained the recognition, admiration and respect of the paleontologists of the day. Others working in the field at the time were almost uniformly male, upper class and Anglican - most of them in fact were clergymen; while Dissenters like Anning were banned from university, the army and several professions. It's hard to fathom today the way that the contributions of working class people could be blatantly ignored or appropriated by their so-called 'betters'. During her lifetime she was barred from even attending meetings of the Geological Society of London (let alone applying for membership) because of her sex and many wealthy "paleontologists" published claims of discovery based on having purchased fossils from Anning and other working class fossil hunters (neglecting to mention Anning's name or contribution). Nonetheless, many contemporary geologists and paleontologists became so impressed with her knowledge that they would visit her to consult on the anatomy and classification of fossil finds as well as collaborate on what we would today call field studies, including her friend Henry De la Beche, William Buckland (who acknowledged her role in recognizing the significance of coprolite to the Geological Society), Richard Owen,  Thomas Hawkins (whom she chastised for 'enhancing' his fossil skeletons by mixing finds before this unscientific habit resulted in scandal), Roderick Murchison, the famed Swiss palaeontologist Louis Agassiz (who thanked her in his book Studies of Fossil Fish, and named two species in her honour). She corresponded with the foremost geologists of her day, Charles Lyell, and Adam Sedgwick who taught Darwin. 

Her family was poor and her parents struggled with adequately support their 10 children (only two of whom survived infancy and childhood). Mary's formal education only included reading and writing which she was taught by the local Congregationalist school. Her father was a cabinet maker (who tragically died young) who like other locals supplemented his income by selling 'curios' to tourists, which were mainly ammonite fossils called 'snake stones' at the time. I've shown two of these spiral, fossil shells of these extinct cephalopods in my print. Mary made her living by selling fossils from a small roadside stand and ultimately a small store she set up in her home. She made her first significant find, the first ichthyosaur skeleton to be correctly identified, with her brother Joseph when she was only 12 years old. I've shown Mary Anning standing in front of the Blue Lias cliffs in front of an ichthyosaur skeleton, like the one she painstakingly excavated. She discovered and excavated the the first two plesiosaur skeletons ever found and the first pterosaur skeleton located outside Germany as well as many important fossil fish. I've also taken the artistic license to show a plesiosaurus fossil above her, based on one she herself found. The cliffs I've illustrated are so packed with fossils, not to underplay the work of finding these fossils, but to try and illustrate the some of the huge scope of her finds. She also worked on invertebrates. Her research showed that belemnite fossils contained fossilised ink sacs like those of modern cephalopods. She was also the first to recognize that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilised... well, animal droppings (feces). While this sounds distinctly unglamorous, the study of coprolites pioneered by Anning and Buckland were vital to understanding ancient ecosystems. Her friend Henry De la Beche painted the first widely circulated representation of a prehistoric (deep time) scene, based on her finds, and he sold prints to benefit her financially.

Despite her limited formal education she read the scientific literature of the day, copying technical anatomical diagrams and made her own dissections of animals to make comparative studies with her fossil finds. Despite the many barriers to her, she did succeed in having her 1839 letter to the editor Magazine of Natural History published, which corrected an erroneous claim about the classification of extinct sharks.

Gathering fossils along the cliffs, especially following storms when new fossils could be found due to the recent erosion and during the winter months was dangerous work. The tides could come in quickly and the cliffs were not always stable. She narrowly escaped being crushed in a landslide which claimed the life of her faithful dog Tray.

Though she resented the way her own work was ignored or appropriated by others, she did become increasingly well-known, as her life advanced and posthumously. She struggled financially for most of her life, and she did receive help from colleagues who held her in high esteem. Nine years before her death she was given an annuity, raised by members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Geological Society of London.  After she was diagnosed with cancer, in 1846 the Geological Society raised money from its members to help with her expenses and the council of the newly created Dorset County Museum made her an honorary member. When she died, Henry De la Beche wrote and read her eulogy at a Geological Society meeting beginning,

"I cannot close this notice of our losses by death without advertising to that of one, who though not placed among even the easier classes of society, but one who had to earn her daily bread by her labour, yet contributed by her talents and untiring researches in no small degree to our knowledge of the great Enalio-Saurians, and other forms of organic life entombed in the vicinity of Lyme Regis ..."

Members of the Society commissioned stained glass windows in her parish church in her memory. Charles Dickens wrote of her in 1865 that "[t]he carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and has deserved to win it." 


She has since been recognized for her scientific contributions by the Royal Society, paleontologists, geologists, historians of science and even in some popular culture. It is often repeated that she is the subject of the well-known tongue-twister

She sells seashells on the seashore
The shells she sells are seashells, I'm sure
So if she sells seashells on the seashore
Then I'm sure she sells seashore shells.

but there is no solid evidence to support this; in fact, this is likely metafolklore, a folktale about a tongue twister. She appears in in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) by John Fowles, and she is the subject of the historical novels Remarkable Creatures (2009) by Tracy Chevalier and Curiosity (2010) by Joan Thomas.

This post contains much information from the remarkably thorough wikipedia entry on Mary Anning, the Natural History Museaum biography of Mary Anning (which calls her "the greatest fossil hunter ever known") and though it was a novel and takes some license with personal relationships for the sake of an engaging story, the very enjoyable 'Curiosity' (2010) by Joan Thomas (which I reviewed here). Edited August 26, 2023 to correct myth about tongue twister.

Preparations

Tomorrow, I'll be selling minouette prints at the Shop Cats Pop-Up store for the Scadding Court Harvest Festival! Along with the harvest festival, there will be a number of pop-ups in repurposed shipping containers at Bathurst & Dundas. Come check it out!

This evening the Toronto Etsy Street Team is having a social media summit & pot-luck, so today, I'm gathering supplies for the show and goodies for this evening. Thinking ahead a little, I thought people will want to be prepared for Ada Lovelace Day (ALD13) this October 15th. So, now you can get my Ada Lovelace linocut on tee shirts (or totes, cell phone and laptop skins as well as art prints)!

ALD13 is the 5th annual international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology, science and math. I'm sure you'll all recall, Ada, brilliant proto-software engineer, daughter of absentee father, the mad, bad, and dangerous to know, Lord Byron, she was able to describe and conceptualize software for Charles Babbage's computing engine, before the concepts of software, hardware, or even Babbage's own machine existed! She foresaw that computers would be useful for more than mere number-crunching. For this she is rightly recognized as visionary - at least by those of us who know who she was. She figured out how to compute Bernouilli numbers with a Babbage analytical engine. Tragically, she died at only 36. On October 15, in Ada's name, people around the world are blogging about women in science and technology, whose accomplishments have all too often gone unrecognized or unacknowledged.

Happy International Women's Day

A collection of pioneers and revolutionaries in science, who were women, for International Women's Day. These women foresaw the potential of computer programming, set the scale of our universe, discovered the inner core of the Earth, were the preeminent mathematician of their time in Ptolemaic Egypt, discovered and explained nuclear fission, and discovered that the Weak force violates parity (the first discovery of 'symmetry breaking' in one of the fundamental forces of our universe).

Ada Lovelace Day post... about me!

I like to see how people find things from secret minouette places, thus I do check out the shop statistics. I was flattered and surprised to see that QUEST ("an award-winning multimedia science and environment series created by KQED, San Francisco, the public media station serving Northern California") had posted to their blog about Ada Lovelace Day, including my portaits of both Ada, Countess Lovelace and Chien-Shung Wu in Madame Wu and the Violation of Parity. Further, the author was kind enough to write,

Women like Lovelace and Wu are particularly inspiring because they entered STEM fields at times in history when few women saw it as an option. But valuable role models can also be found among contemporary female scientists–such as the creator of the Madame Wu woodcut!* For her day job, geophysicist Eleanor Willoughby studies** marine gas hydrates at the University of Toronto. But as minouette, she makes and sells beautiful linoleum block prints on Etsy, many of them inspired by science and scientists–including the print of Countess Lovelace, Enchantress of Numbers, shown above.

(If you aren't familiar with the term, STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and math.) I'm very flattered to read this, and to be described as a role model. They found my work through the recent post on The Finch and Pea and the brief description of my scientific research through the university website.


I'm glad to see that the version of Madame Wu and the Violation of Parity included is the second edition. This is because I made a small correction! Never before have I corrected a linocut for scientific accuracy. You see, I got a friendly note from the editor of Physics World inviting me to respond to a letter to the editor about my artwork on the September issue cover. Though I (and, actually, a fair number of scientists I know) had looked at the image many times, it had escaped my notice that the polarity of the currents did not match the direction of the magnetic fields. I felt quite sheepish to read this as it was something I had thought about and specifically intended to avoid. However, it's the printmaker's perpetual pitfall; just as type must be reversed, it turns out that the wrapping of a solenoid must be reversed in a relief print! So, in my sketch and on my block, the physics is correct, but the process of making a relief print reversed the geometry (so the currents no longer matched the magnetic field directions). The irony here is that this parallels Madame Wu's experiment and the violation of parity itself! The physics is simply not the same when reflected as in the mirror. The simple correction is to change the current direction by removing the '+' symbols and reversing the short and long lines in the symbol for the power source. I wrote a response letter which I thought was very cute, explaining that the error was 'an artifact of my methodology', which is how physicists speak to one another (but I think my little joke did not make the cut).

*the process is very similar, but it's actually a linocut
**should be passed tense, as I am not currently at U of T