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Celebrate the women behind the periodic table

Brigitte Van Tiggelen and Annette Lykknes spotlight female researchers who discovered elements and their properties.
  1. Brigitte Van Tiggelen

    1. Brigitte Van Tiggelen is a historian of chemistry and director for European operations at the Science History Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. She is co-editor of the forthcoming book Women in their Element: Selected Women’s Contributions to the Periodic System, to be published by World Scientific in August.

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  2. Annette Lykknes

    1. Annette Lykknes is a professor of chemistry education and historian of chemistry at NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. She is co-editor of the forthcoming book Women in their Element: Selected Women’s Contributions to the Periodic System, to be published by World Scientific in August.

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Ida Noddack

German chemist Ida Noddack left industry to hunt for missing elements, and co-discovered rhenium. Credit: KU Leuven University Archives

The story of how dozens of elements were corralled into a periodic table reaches beyond one person and one point in time. Scientists classified and predicted elements before and after Dmitri Mendeleev’s 1869 framework. And many more worked to find and explain these new substances. Noble gases, radioactivity, isotopes, subatomic particles and quantum mechanics were all unknown in the mid-nineteenth century.

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Nature 565, 559-561 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00287-7

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