Harriet brooks family biography samples

  • Brooks - her life and work.
  • Harriet Brooks was the first Canadian female nuclear physicist, who worked as a graduate student with Sir Ernest Rutherford at McGill.
  • Born in Boston, Suffolk County, MA on to John Brooks and Sarah Hathorn.

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    Harriet Brooks’ great-great niece to inspire next generation of women in science

    Canada’s first female nuclear physicist Harriet Brooks

    Harriet Brooks was the first Canadian female nuclear physicist, who worked as a graduate student with Sir Ernest Rutherford at McGill University around the beginning of the 20th century.

    She was among the first persons to discover radon and to try to determine its atomic mass.

    Well known in Canadian nuclear circles, Brooks is not a household name like Marie Curie, under whose supervision Brooks briefly worked.

    While Canadian Nuclear Laboratories recently named a nuclear research laboratory at Chalk River in her name and she is a member of the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame, she hasn’t made an impact in the non-academic and non-science culture like Curie, who was honoured, for example, with a Google Doodle on the anniversary of her birth.

    Now, 85 years after she passed away, one of her descendants is trying to

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    Harriet Brooks, linocut 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2018
    When physicists first stumbled upon the phenomenon of radioactivity and shockingly found themselves becoming modern-day alchemists, at the turn of the last century, a promising young Canadian woman made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the nascent field of nuclear physics. Ernest Rutherford (later Lord Rutherford the Nobel laureate) recruited Harriet Brooks (1876 - 1933) while he was working at McGill University in Montreal. Rutherford, now considered one of the giants of early 20th century physics, was a frank New Zealander, known for his dry humour who famously described all of science as either physics or "stamp collecting". I do not imagine he was generous with his compliments, but he stated that Brooks was second only to Marie Curie in her capacity for and understanding of radioactivity. An excellent research physicist, Rutherford was clearly a dedicated and thoughtful supervisor who knew
  • harriet brooks family biography samples

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    Harriet Brooks

    When Harriet Brooks was born on 13 June 1807, in Otsego, New York, United States, her father, Benjamin Brooks, was 23 and her mother, Anna Warner, was 30. She married David Bresee on 29 April 1826, in Schoharie, New York, United States. They were the parents of at least 5 sons and 5 daughters. She died on 6 June 1841, in Will, Illinois, United States, at the age of 33, and was buried in Brooks Cemetery, Homer Township, Will, Illinois, United States.