Émilie Du Châtelet was born in France in 1706. She learned Latin as a child but enjoyed a social whirl in Paris after marrying a Marquis. Twenty-six, she made intellectual friends and applied herself to scholarship. Voltaire cleverly wooed her by praising her intellect. Émilie submitted papers to a contest, suggesting ideas such as different colours of light carrying different degrees of heat. The paper - under her husband's name - was published by the French Academy of Sciences. She wrote books on mathematics and physics, and died soon after giving birth.

Maria Gaetana Agnesi, in Milan, was in 1745 the first woman to author and supervise the printing of a book of advanced mathematics. She was advanced in languages due to her father, and by twenty she was publishing theses of natural philosophy and science. After her father's death she worked to aid the poor.

Sophie Germain, without formal training, applied herself to learning mathematics and working on Fermat's Last Theorem, among other issues. Napoleonic France was subject to rules barring women from attending lectures. This was a time of turbulence in Europe, and these ladies had relatives who were guillotined. Their wealth enabled them to study all day, advancing science by buying materials for experimentation and publishing privately.

Hertha Ayerton was the daughter of a Jewish refugee from Czarist Poland, born in England in 1854, and she attended the new Girton College for Women in Cambridge University. She had already made herself financially independent as a governess and mathematics tutor. She patented inventions and delivered lectures for women on electricity and how it might save labour in the home, giving examples such as sewing machines and clocks. Conducting many acclaimed experiments and publishing, she became the first woman electrical engineer, but the Royal Society, while applauding her work, refused to grant her membership on the grounds that a married woman had no legal status of her own. Not surprisingly Hertha, who was married to a professor, joined the militant suffragette movement.

Florence Sabin, born in the United States in 1871, became the leading female medical researcher of her generation, helped by grants from a wealthy spinster, Mary Elizabeth Garrett, who aided in founding John Hopkins University provided that it was open to both sexes. Like medical researcher Helen Taussig, who worked to save 'blue babies', Sabin was underpaid and passed over for promotion compared to male colleagues in academia. However, her work was on such highly relevant issues as tuberculosis and public health, and she received many honours in later life. Austrian Marietta Blau, meanwhile, had worked in the Radium Institute but fled the rise of Nazi Germany, moving to Mexico and then the US. Her work with cosmic radiation and particle physics led to her being awarded the Schrödinger Prize in 1962.

Gerty Cori was awarded the Nobel Prize for cutting-edge biochemistry, along with her devoted husband and co-worker Carl. Irene Curie, daughter of Marie, was awarded the French Military Medal, and with her husband in 1935 won a Nobel Prize in chemistry, although women in France, where they lived, could not vote. By combining quantum physics and stellar atmospheres, Cecilia Payne helped to establish the field of astrophysics. Jane Cooke Wright, born in 1919, was the only African-American woman in her class, but made breakthroughs in chemotherapy, receiving many awards. Rosalind Franklin is now well known as the fourth person to have contributed to the work granted the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA, awarded to three men.

Reading these fascinating biographies just makes me want to find out more, and the splendid photos and illustrations bring the people and topics vividly to life. All of these women deserve to be celebrated and their achievements are a remarkable struggle against war, bias and unequal opportunities, helping to advance the status of women. I noticed that true intellectual men were more interested in ideas and advancing science, no matter the sex of the scientist. REMARKABLE MINDS by Pendred Noyce is an enlightening and stimulating read, which may inspire a new generation of women.

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