Radioactivity, Laser and Blackhole - Women who changed the World

After the announcement of the Nobel Prize this year, I, like many others, were a bit disappointed because there was no woman winner.

 

Indeed, in the 120-year history of the Nobel Prize, out of all 972 winners, only 58 are women, of which Marie Curie won twice, so there were total 57 women Nobel Prize winners.  Among them, only 21 won the prize in science, accounting for a low 3%.  The Physics Prize is the hardest hit area.  There are only 4 female winners, with the first 3 being separated by 60 years, such that after the 3rd winner was announced in 2018, I thought that I would never see a woman win Nobel physics prize again in my life. . . .

 

Aside from the objective reason that the base number of female scientists is relatively small, another reason is that the contribution of women in teams is less likely to be valued and seen.  Chien-Shiung Wu, Rosalind Franklin, and Vera Rubin are a few examples of female scientists who have been left out the prize they deserved.

 

My intention in creating the "Women Who Changed the World" jewelry series is to increase awareness of the outstanding Women in STEM, so that their contributions can be seen, their stories can be told, and thus more women in the STEM field could be inspired and encouraged.  This series celebrate not only Nobel Prize winners, but also many other brilliant women in STEM fields.

 

The 3 new designs that will be released next week, and the one that has been released before, add up to a total of 4 jewelry pieces, telling the story of 4 female Nobel Prize winners in physics in history. They are Marie Curie, who was awarded for her extraordinary work in radioactivity in 1903; Maria Goeppert Mayer, who was awarded for discovery of nuclear shell structure in 1963; Donna Strickland, who won for method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short laser in 2018; and Andrea Ghez, who won the Physics prize for the discovery of black holes in the center of our galaxy in 2020.