The Women of the Moon: Tales of Science, Love, Sorrow, and Courage
ISBN: 9780191879951
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Astronomy and Astrophysics History of Physics;

Revealing that 1558 craters on the moon have been named for men, but only 28 for women, this valuable survey offers an illuminating perspective on the latter. Physicist Altschuler and astronomer Ballesteros share short, chronologically arranged, biographies of these women, beginning with Hypatia, a mathematician and astronomer born circa 355 C.E. Comet-hunter Caroline Herschel, born in 1750, was eclipsed by her brother William, discoverer of Uranus, yet for her own part discovered more comets than any other women until 1980. Other groundbreaking women active in the 19th century include Maria Mitchell, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' first female member, and Harvard "computer" and pioneering astronomer Williamina Fleming. Chapters on astronomer Priscilla Fairfield Bok, nuclear physicist Lise Meitner, and mathematician Amalie Emmy Noether, all 20th-century figures, reveal brilliant women threatened by political as well as gender-based barriers. The biographies of four NASA crew members killed in space shuttle disasters--Challenger's Judy Resnik and Christa McAuliffe and Columbia's Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark--and of cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova (the book's only still-living subject), close out the collection. The cumulative result of these neat but telling histories is a memorable introduction to 28 strong, smart, and too often forgotten female pioneers of science and exploration. (Sept.)


Daniel R. Altschuler, Full Professor, Physics Department, University of Puerto Rico, RIo Piedras Campus,Fernando J. Ballesteros, Head of instrumentation, Astronomical Observatory of the University of Valencia

Daniel Altschuler Stern is a professor in the Physics Department of the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus. In 1991, he was appointed Senior Research Associate at Cornell University and Director of the Arecibo Observatory, a post he held for 13 years. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Max Planck institute for Radio Astronomy, and a UNESCO fellow at the University of Valencia. His research centered on radio astronomy, in particular on active galactic nuclei and hydrogen in galaxies. In 2010, he received the Andrew Gemant Award from the American Institute of Physics (AIP) for his science outreach work. Altschuler Stern is the author of Children of the Stars, published by Cambridge University Press and translated into Spanish and Italian. His latest book is Contra la Simpleza, Sciencia y Pseudociencia.


Fernando Ballesteros Rosello is Head of Instrumentation at the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Valencia. He worked on the design of the gamma-ray space telescope INTEGRAL (ESA), in orbit around the earth. Currently his research centers on astrobiology and exoplanets. In 2006 he was awarded the European Prize for Scientific Outreach, Estudi General, for his book E.T. Talk: How Will We Communicate with Intelligent Life on Other Worlds? and the Bronze Prism award in 2016 for his book, Fractales y caos. La aventura de la complejidad. He is the author of over ten other books, including: Astrobiologia, un puente entre el Big Bang y la vida and 10.000 anos mirando estrellas. He was co-host of the Spanish National Radio program "The Sounds of Science" and regularly publishes science outreach articles in the press.

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