Electronics Weekly
The lead story in next day’s Telegraph opened: “Once again has woman demonstrated her superiority in the face of an incredulous and somewhat unsympathetic world.”
Her feat was memorialised in a poem:
‘Curve and angle let her con and
Parallelopipedon and
Parallelogram
Few can equal, none can beat her
At eliminating theta
By the river Cam.’
She taught at Cambridge for ten years receiving this accolade from one of her students: “My deepest debt to her is a sense of the unity of all truth, from the smallest detail to the highest that we know.”
She never received a degree from Cambridge and died in 1948 – a month after the university decided to allow women to be awarded its BA degree.
Moral: A fine life is not defined by titles
That’s the girl, zeitghost, a very special lady
Phillipa Fawcett. 1868 – 1948.