Here's another one, showing that computer science was not only deeply influenced by women, it was practically invented by women (and Alan Turing, who was gay, by the way): Ada Lovelace. I think the language "Ada", which I've heard looks a lot like PL/SQL (near and dear to my heart) is named after her. Other great female candidates for the $20 are in this article.
Here's a link to the previous post and the original post.
Here are some other candidates to be on the $20 bill, or other units of currency (almost all are Americans)
Edith Clarke, mathematician, electric power pioneer
Cecillia Payne, discovered how stars work
Annie Bell, compiled data for Cecillia Payne
Marie Tharp, discovered continental drift
Rosalind Franklin, x-ray crystallography critical to discovery of DNA
Grace Hopper, inventor of COBOL, computer science pioneer
Radia Perlman, RSTP, etc., "The mother of the Internet"
Bella Abzug, Mayor of New York
Golda Meir, 4th prime minister of Israel
Catherine the Great, architect of Modern Russia
Marie Curie, discoverer of radioactivity
Lise Meitner, first to explain nuclear fission, 109th element "Meitnerium", director at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
Murasaki Shikibu, authoress of the world's oldest novel, The Tale of Genji
So, for starters, the Internet, the world's most popular computing language (through the 90s anyway), some of the most important phenomena that make our world work which we didn't understand AT ALL before: continental drift, that stars are made of mostly hydrogen, how they work, etc., what radioactivity is, how nuclear fission works, the idea that fields and particles can produce our reality, and what DNA is and how it's structured, and don't let's forget transmitting power over long distances with electricity, among many other things, were ALL the accomplishments of WOMEN.
I wrote another little piece on great women of our time.
The following video is almost too whingey to be included, but it highlights the women I mention above. I love it when women are shown as excelling at the same work that men do, proving that they can do it, that there is nothing inherent about being a woman that makes one less capable (in keeping with basic macromemetic theory), but the “political feminists” have to carry on and wreck it with comments that "she would've had it easier if she were a man". You could just as well say "what if he weren't a jew" (Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman and many others) or "what if he weren't from a working-class background" (Michael Faraday and Richard Feynman again) or suchlike. No, I think that a hypothetical "Cecil Payne" would've been told the same thing by his advisor, i.e., that his ideas were so transformational that his doctoral thesis might get rejected, just like male scientists have been told throughout history, though luckily these days they aren't threatened with excommunication or burning at the stake by the Pope like they used to be. In fact, I'm especially grateful to Cecillia Payne for her discoveries since my take is that since she was coming at it as a (female) outsider, she may have been more empowered to think outside the box than any of her male contemporaries who were boxed in by the kind of group-think and pressure towards conformatism that men have to put up with on a daily basis. I wish political feminists would take that into account once in a while.
