The women scientists players miss most (and what they built)
In this game, Marie Curie has been typed 1,123 times. She sits comfortably inside the top ten most-named people across the entire site, right alongside global pop stars and world leaders.
She is also the only scientist in the top fifty.
The next woman recognized primarily for a breakthrough in physics, computing, or biology does not appear until rank 84. When players reach for a scientist under the pressure of the clock, they name Curie, feel a brief burst of momentum, and then hit an immediate wall. We call this the Single-Scientist Trap.
It is not because women were absent from the foundations of modern science. It is because cultural memory tends to keep exactly one token female scientist in active circulation. Here is what our game data reveals about that blind spot — and twelve names to carry into your next run.
The single-scientist trap in real numbers
The drop-off after Marie Curie is steep. While Curie appears in roughly one out of every ten completed games, the women who mapped DNA, discovered nuclear fission, and wrote the foundations of software barely register:
| Scientist | Times named | What she discovered or built |
|---|---|---|
| Marie Curie | 1,123 | Radioactivity; discovery of polonium and radium (Physics 1903, Chemistry 1911) |
| Rosalind Franklin | 48 | Photo 51; proved the double-helix density and geometry of DNA |
| Ada Lovelace | 42 | The first published computer algorithm (1843) |
| Grace Hopper | 29 | The first compiler (A-0) and standards for machine-independent code |
| Katherine Johnson | 19 | Orbital trajectory calculations for Project Mercury and Apollo 11 |
| Chien-Shiung Wu | 11 | The "Wu Experiment" that disproved the law of conservation of parity |
| Tu Youyou | 8 | Extracted artemisinin, cutting global malaria deaths in half |
| Barbara McClintock | 6 | Discovered genetic transposition ("jumping genes") |
| Lise Meitner | 4 | Theoretical framework and calculation for nuclear fission |
| Vera Rubin | 2 | Measured galaxy rotation curves, confirming the existence of dark matter |
Ten scientists. One is named over a thousand times; nine combined are named fewer than two hundred.
Below are twelve women across four disciplines who built essential parts of our world.
Computing: the architects before the hardware
Modern software is built on ideas developed by women decades before consumer personal computers existed.
1. Ada Lovelace (1815–1852)
Working with Charles Babbage's mechanical Analytical Engine, Ada Lovelace wrote an algorithm to compute Bernoulli numbers. More importantly, she realized that machines could manipulate symbols representing music, text, and logic, rather than just quantities — defining the concept of general-purpose computing.
2. Grace Hopper (1906–1992)
A rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, Grace Hopper believed programming should be written in human-readable English words rather than raw machine code. In 1952, she built the A-0 System, the world's first compiler, paving the way for COBOL and all modern high-level languages.
3. Katherine Johnson (1918–2020)
At NASA's Langley Research Center, Katherine Johnson calculated flight paths, launch windows, and emergency return trajectories for the first American in space (Alan Shepard) and the 1969 Apollo 11 lunar landing. When NASA first transitioned to electronic computers, astronaut John Glenn asked engineers to have Johnson verify the machine's numbers by hand before his orbital flight.
Physics and the atom: discoveries credited to others
The history of 20th-century physics contains several discoveries where male colleagues received the Nobel Prize while the women who conducted the research were overlooked.
4. Lise Meitner (1878–1968)
Physicist Lise Meitner led the research group in Berlin investigating uranium bombardment. After fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938, she and Otto Frisch derived the first physical explanation and mathematical model for splitting an atomic nucleus, coining the term nuclear fission. Her collaborator Otto Hahn was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone.
5. Chien-Shiung Wu (1912–1997)
Known as the "First Lady of Physics," Chien-Shiung Wu designed and executed the 1956 cryogenic experiment that proved weak subatomic interactions violate the principle of parity. Theoretical physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang received the 1957 Nobel Prize for proposing the concept; Wu's experimental verification was excluded from the prize.
6. Emmy Noether (1882–1935)
Mathematician Emmy Noether solved a critical flaw in Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity by formulating Noether's Theorem. She proved that every continuous symmetry in nature corresponds directly to a fundamental conservation law (such as the conservation of energy and momentum).
Medicine and biology: how we survive disease
Breakthroughs that treat acute illness, understand heredity, and edit the human genome rest on the work of women who investigated living systems at molecular scale.
7. Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958)
Chemist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin captured Photo 51 in May 1952. The image provided the definitive physical measurements of the DNA B-form helix. Her unpublished data was shared with James Watson and Francis Crick without her knowledge or permission, forming the structural foundation for their famous double-helix model.
8. Tu Youyou (born 1930)
During the Vietnam War, malaria was devastating populations across Southeast Asia. Pharmaceutical chemist Tu Youyou screened hundreds of ancient Chinese medical texts, identifying Artemisia annua and isolating artemisinin through low-temperature extraction. Artemisinin-based therapies have saved millions of lives and earned her the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
9. Barbara McClintock (1902–1992)
Studying the genetics of maize over decades, Barbara McClintock discovered that genetic elements can physically change positions on a chromosome. Her discovery of "jumping genes" (transposons) was dismissed for twenty years until molecular techniques confirmed that genomes are dynamic, earning her an unshared Nobel Prize in 1983.
10. Jennifer Doudna (born 1964)
Biochemist Jennifer Doudna co-developed CRISPR-Cas9 as a programmable tool for genome editing in 2012. The technology allows researchers to modify DNA sequences with unprecedented precision, transforming cancer therapies, agricultural resilience, and genetic disease research.
Space and the earth: measuring the unseen
Observing what is too vast or too dispersed to see directly requires novel instruments and sharp hypothesis testing.
11. Vera Rubin (1928–2016)
Astronomer Vera Rubin measured the orbital speeds of stars in outer spiral galaxies. Expecting outer stars to move slower than inner ones, she discovered they moved at the exact same velocity — providing the first direct observational evidence that galaxies are embedded in massive halos of dark matter.
12. Rachel Carson (1907–1964)
Marine biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, meticulously detailing the bioaccumulation of synthetic pesticides like DDT through food webs. Her work directly spurred the ban on DDT, reshaped public understanding of ecology, and led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
How to break the single-scientist trap in your next game
When you stall around forty names during the challenge, the pause usually happens because your brain stays locked on modern entertainment.
To reach one hundred, stop searching for names at random and switch to a structured quadrant:
- Code: Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Katherine Johnson
- Atom: Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, Chien-Shiung Wu
- Cell: Rosalind Franklin, Tu Youyou, Barbara McClintock
- Cosmos & Earth: Vera Rubin, Rachel Carson, Sally Ride
Memorizing one name in each quadrant reopens an entire branch of history. Explore the full breakdown on our data page, browse all cataloged figures in the women directory, or read more about how the 100-name challenge began.
Cover portraits via Wikimedia Commons: Marie Curie (public domain), Ada Lovelace (public domain), Rosalind Franklin (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, CC BY-SA 4.0), Grace Hopper (public domain), Tu Youyou (Bengt Nyman, CC BY 2.0), Gertrude B. Elion (GlaxoSmithKline, CC BY 4.0), Barbara McClintock (Smithsonian Institution, public domain), Jane Goodall (U.S. Department of State, public domain).