Cecilia Payne Why did Wendover Parish Council decide to fix a blue plaque to a house in Wendover? It was the birthplace on 10 May 1900 of an astonishing woman who acknowledged the important part Wendover played in allowing her to do the genuinely world beating work she did in Harvard. That led to her obituary in the Washington Post, no less, in December 1979.
was not much mathematics or science. Just before her seventeenth birthday her school told her it could do no more for her and asked her to leave.
described her work as "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy". Her findings were later accepted and although astronomer Henry Norris Russell later admiringly acknowledged Payne's earlier By 1918 she had moved to St Paul's School work and discovery, he is often credited for where she was taught by Gustav Holst (The the conclusions she reached. Planets) who urged her to study music but she preferred to Dr Payne had to take a job as an "assistant" focus on science and at Harvard, despite her qualifications but she She only had to cross the following year won was allowed to lecture. She met astronomer Chiltern Road from a scholarship that paid Sergei Gasposchkin in Gottingen, Germany number 47 to number all her expenses for in 1933 and engineered his escape to 36, a private school run Newnham, Cambridge Harvard from the new Nazi regime. They by Elizabeth Edwards to study botany. She married later. Her obituary described her as – who told her classes was inspired by a Phillips professor of astronomy emeritus at that women were the lecture on astronomy Harvard University. Recognition at last. stronger sex. At age and that was the field Photo: harvardsquarelibrary.org eight, Cecilia decided to she worked in for the become a scientist. This happened after rest of her life. Although she completed she recognized a plant she had previously the course, she couldn't be awarded her known only from her mother’s description degree from Cambridge until 1948. Her of it – the bee orchid. Cecilia learned to read only professional option was teaching and became an avid reader. There were but she managed to win a fellowship to frequent exercises in mental arithmetic. encourage women to study at the Harvard Miss Edwards required her girls to learn College Observatory. She was the second lengthy poems by heart – Cecilia said this female student to join. Her thesis concluded helped her later scientific work because it that hydrogen was the overwhelming developed her memory to a very high level. constituent of stars. Her supervisors were Cecilia Payne in her office at Harvard, 1946, Cecilia loved her school so much that when sceptical and suppressed this finding but with, Kathryn, Edward and Sergei Gaposchkin the family moved to London, the twelve in 1923 she became the first woman from photo - https://apps.carleton.edu/campus/ year old found her new school "inferior to the observatory to be granted a PhD. A observatory/research/cindystudents/1997sp/ women/payne/ the little school in Wendover" because there few years later, astronomer Otto Struve
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