History of Science Readings | November 2019

150 Years of Scientific Illustration

“The visual continues to work as a foundation for making sense of data. The tools, as we have seen, have radically changed. The power of images has not.” Nature 575, 25-28 (2019) doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-03306-9

Rosa Smith and the Gender Politics of 19th-Century Ichthyological Discovery

“In fact, Smith resisted the special distinction that sometimes came with being a woman in science. In an 1892 piece for The West American Scientist, she denounced the patronizing encouragement that often accompanied women’s scientific work, arguing, “Comparatively speaking, so few women have entered this field of knowledge that when one does accomplish somewhat she is as loudly lauded as the precocious child. But in science as everywhere else in the domain of thought women should be judged by the same standard as her brother. Her work must not be simply very well done for a woman.” In the same essay, she described the importance of professional mentorship while going on to extensively highlight the accomplishments of her women peers.

Early Women Ichthyologists publication by NOAA Fisheries/Southwest Fisheries Science Center Laboratory

The Woman Who Reshaped Maths

But Geiringer’s work was more than her livelihood. It was her calling. “I must work scientifically,” she wrote in a 1953 letter to the president of Wheaton College in Massachusetts. “It is perhaps the deepest need in my life.”

Thomas Edison’s Lady Glassblowers

“Those forty lamps on the Miller’s Christmas tree in 1888, along with millions of other lamps were created by the skilled female flameworkers of the Edison and later General Electric lamp works in Harrison. It is quite a legacy that from the time of the introduction of electric lamps in 1879, all the way to the invention of television in 1927, the delicate glasswork of the electric lighting industry was firmly entrusted to the competent hands of women.”

Unraveling the Mystery of Luther Burbank’s famous plums

“With only a high school education and no scientific training, Burbank was a self-taught genius and a relentless experimenter, who, it turns out, took extremely poor notes. Still, Burbank filled a collection of notebooks with his large, ungainly scrawl, describing in the briefest of terms his plant breeding experiments. Many of these descriptions are accompanied by hatchmarks — the meaning of which is still a mystery today — and fruit prints, which he made by cutting a fruit in half and pressing it onto the page.

Because Burbank was secretive about his plant breeding methods — and iffy with his notetaking — the origins of some of his most famous crosses are still mysterious.”

Natural Language Processing Dates Back to Kabbalist Mystics

 “Most trace the origins of this field back to the beginning of the computer age, when Alan Turing, writing in 1950, imagined a smart machine that could interact fluently with a human via typed text on a screen. For this reason, machine-generated language is mostly understood as a digital phenomenon—and a central goal of artificial intelligence (AI) research.

This six-part series will challenge that common understanding of NLP. In fact, attempts to design formal rules and machines that can analyze, process, and generate language go back hundreds of years.This is part one of a six-part series on the history of natural language processing.”

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Ichthyology_BHL6232575.jpg

Bushnan, J. Stevenson; Hamilton, Robert; Jardine, William; Lizars, W. H.; Schomburgk, Robert H. [Public domain]