[hermitdev]

Does it matter?

I think this misses the forest for the trees.

Yeah, we can focus on the first to discover something, but awards and acknowledgments are often on first to publish, e.g. Make it public.

After all, what does your grand descovery matter if you're the only one that knows about it and someone working in parallel finds it also and publishes first? And how does the scientific community verify the veracity of discovering first if you didnt publish first?

Hilbert might have know about it first, but what does it matter to the world writ large if he didnt publish? Einstein published, and thus the world knows and he is thus recognized for that.

[onion2k]

Does it matter?

If we want an accurate historical record of human achievement, yes.

That's separate to the end result. If you're focused on the theory and nothing else, then it doesn't really matter that Einstein wrote it either. We could remove the attribution entirely and the theory would still exist.

Hilbert might have know about it first, but what does it matter to the world writ large if he didnt publish? Einstein published, and thus the world knows and he is thus recognized for that.

That depends on why Hilbert didn't publish first. There are plenty of examples of people from minorities (women and PoC especially) discovering theorems but the scientific community ignoring them, and then a rich white man publishing the same theory to great acclaim. And then, even hundreds of years later, governments failing to fund the education of those minorities on the basis that they're genetically inferior because no one from those minorities has published anything of note.

Correctly attributing discoveries to the right people does make a difference in the wider context of society.

[lr4444lr]

There are plenty of examples of people from minorities (women and PoC especially) discovering theorems but the scientific community ignoring them

Can you provide 2 or 3 examples of that? I know there are STEM contributions on the engineering side - patents, work at NASA - that often go unmentioned, but I've never heard of solid evidence that actual provable research was ignored.

[onion2k]

Esther Lederberg - discovered lambda phage in bacteria but the Nobel Prize for Medicine for the discovery went to her husband.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell - discovered pulsars and went on to work with her thesis advisor Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle. They got the Nobel Prize for Physics and she didn't.

Ada Lovelace - invented computer programming but the credit went to Charles Babbage because he invented the hardware (one of the more well known examples; she gets some credit these days).

Rosalind Franklin - discovered the double helix structure of DNA using x-rays. Her theory was denounced by Watson and Crick who believed it was a single helix. They went on to win a Nobel Prize when they changed their minds and said it was actually a double helix after all.

Lise Meitner - discovered nuclear fission but the credit and Nobel Prize went to her lab partner Otto Hahn.

[gjm11]

Unfortunately, a lot of that appears to be wrong. (Unfortunately because I'm sure it's true that recognition goes disproportionately to white men in rich Western countries, but you harm your case by giving examples of this that turn out to be wrong.)

Joshua Lederberg's Nobel prize was not for the lambda phage discovered by his wife, it was "for his discoveries concerning genetic recombination and the organization of the genetic material of bacteria".

No question about Burnell. That's a major scandal. The only good news is that everyone knows it now, and I can't remember any occasion when the discovery of pulsars has been mentioned without something along the lines of "of course it was Burnell who discovered the pulsar and it's shocking that Ryle and Hewish got the Nobel and she didn't".

I've never seen Babbage get the credit for inventing computer programming. I have seen him get the credit for designing the first programmable computer, which is fair enough because he did.

I'm interested in the evidence that Franklin discovered the double-helix structure of DNA. For sure her work was super-important and it's scandalous that she didn't get a share in the Nobel prize, but so far as I can tell she specifically thought the structure of DNA probably wasn't helical, even though others working on the problem thought it was.

(It doesn't look to me as if Crick and Watson ever thought the structure was a single helix, either. I think their first model was a triple helix with the phosphate groups on the inside, and Franklin pointed out to them that the phosphates had to be on the outside.)

Meitner should absolutely have got a Nobel (or a share in it) for fission. But what reason is there to think that sexism is why she didn't? Frisch had about as much claim as Meitner, and he was passed over in the exact same way.

Incidentally, what you said before is that it often happens that women and PoC discover theorems and are ignored while rich white men do the same later and get the credit, but none of your examples involves discovering theorems. [EDITED to add:] Oh, but maybe "theorems" was just a typo for "theories", in which case you should probably ignore this paragraph.

[bobcostas55]

>Rosalind Franklin - discovered the double helix structure of DNA using x-rays.

This is a gross mischaracterization. Fraklin certainly took some pictures of DNA using x-ray crystallography, but she absolutely did not figure out the structure.

[sannee]

Yeah - and if you believe Watsons autobiography, she was strongly opposed to the idea that DNA had a helical structure until Watson and Crick basically figured it out and presented her with some very convincing arguments.

Franklins contributions seem pretty overstated compared to how people don't mention all the other people involved that had some critical insight.

[drfuchs]

As a Ph.D. candidate at Radcliffe, Cecilia Payne discovered that, contrary to accepted theory of the time, stars (and the universe) are mostly hydrogen, and not the same mix of stuff here on earth. Established astronomer Henry Norris Russell reviewed her thesis and got her to drop this conclusion; then he published the same result later, and is typically credited with its discovery.

[gjm11]

That's a bit misleading. (Not deliberately, I'm sure.)

When Russell published the same result later, here's one thing he said: "The most important previous determination of the abundance of the elements by astrophysical means is that by Miss Payne, who determined, by Milne's method of marginal appearances, the relative abundance of eighteen of the most important elements." He shows Payne's figures and remarks on how gratifying it is that his numbers agree with hers, given that the methods used to obtain them are so different.

Payne's numbers that Russell compares against include the figure for hydrogen, and indeed that figure does appear in her thesis. So she didn't drop it entirely. What she did do was to add this sentence: "Although hydrogen and helium are manifestly very abundant in stellar atmospheres, the actual values derived from the estimates of marginal appearance are regarded as spurious."

So it's not that Russell suppressed Payne's research and then tried to claim it as his own. She asked him to look at her thesis. He said it was good but that he didn't believe the figure for the abundance of hydrogen. (Nor, I think, would many other astronomers at the time have done.) She published the thesis including her estimate of the abundance of hydrogen, but said that that's "regarded as spurious." Russell continued to work on this stuff (it was already a focus of his research, which is why she sent her thesis to him in the first place) and eventually the evidence became so overwhelming that he changed his mind; when he wrote up a paper presenting that evidence, he credited Payne with having got all the numbers right before he did. None of that seems very bad.

If it's true that Russell is typically credited with the discovery that stars are mostly hydrogen, then that's grossly unfair. I don't know how we could determine whether it's because of sexism or because at the time Russell was incredibly eminent and Payne was a new PhD. (Is it true? If I do a web search for <<henry norris russell discovered abundance hydrogen stars>>, which seems like if anything it should oversample claims that Russell made the discovery, almost all the resulting documents give credit to Payne. Maybe things on the web tend to be very recent and she's been less unfairly neglected lately?)

[drfuchs]

Right, and he did not include her as a co-author of his paper. That's dirty pool in the academic world.

As for who typically gets credit, yes, I think you'd get a different result if you ask astronomers and astro-physicists who are over 50 years old, or anyone who hung around science museums and planetariums in the 1960's or 70's, or check out old popular science books and magazines, or the Journal for the History of Astronomy October 1983, which takes on the prevailing attitude. Perhaps it's changing, but that's only through the efforts of folks like you, who take the effort to set the record straight.

[gjm11]

Why should Payne have been a coauthor of Russell's paper?

It was (so far as I can tell) entirely independent work on the same question. She deserved a citation (which she got) and acknowledgement that she had got numbers very similar to his (which she got), but you don't make someone a coauthor just because you and they are working on the same problem.