40 min listen
No Place for a Woman in Mathematics? The Woman Who Ended up Supervising The Computations that Proved an Atomic Bomb Would Work
No Place for a Woman in Mathematics? The Woman Who Ended up Supervising The Computations that Proved an Atomic Bomb Would Work
ratings:
Length:
16 minutes
Released:
Aug 3, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Naomi Livesay, born in 1916 in the northern reaches of Montana, aspired to one career: mathematics. She earned a bachelor’s degree in math, but when she decided to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, men on the faculty balked. Mathematics, they said, was no place for a woman.
Then fate intervened, and Livesay embarked on a circuitous route to Los Alamos, where she landed in 1944 and started as a supervisor in the computation lab during the Manhattan Project. She played, as episode guest Nichole Dale Lewis describes it, “a unique role at a unique place under unique pressures.”
Livesay was a reluctant recruit, and it wasn’t until the physicist Richard Feynman stepped in to persuade her to take the job of supervising work on the IBM punch card accounting machinery, that she agreed. And then Oppenheimer himself went out of his way to make sure that Livesay had everything she needed to get the job done.
Then fate intervened, and Livesay embarked on a circuitous route to Los Alamos, where she landed in 1944 and started as a supervisor in the computation lab during the Manhattan Project. She played, as episode guest Nichole Dale Lewis describes it, “a unique role at a unique place under unique pressures.”
Livesay was a reluctant recruit, and it wasn’t until the physicist Richard Feynman stepped in to persuade her to take the job of supervising work on the IBM punch card accounting machinery, that she agreed. And then Oppenheimer himself went out of his way to make sure that Livesay had everything she needed to get the job done.
Released:
Aug 3, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (75)
E2: Women Needed: Klári von Neumann arrives in Princeton just as war breaks out in Europe. by Lost Women of Science