Drive: For the next attempt. - Page 22

Editor’s note

The forward room

Drive is not a command to move faster. This edition gathers forms of momentum that can survive doubt: discipline, courage, repair, patience and the dignity of another attempt.

Q1983

WonderBiology

Janaki Ammal used cytogenetics and hybridization to help breed sugarcane suited to Indian conditions, while advancing the study of chromosome numbers in cultivated plants.

India once relied heavily on imported sugar despite growing extensive cane, because many local plants had lower sugar content. At Coimbatore, Ammal studied wild and cultivated relatives and used their chromosome patterns to guide crosses adapted to the climate. Her later atlas with C. D. Darlington turned chromosome counts into a reference map for plant breeding around the world.

Janaki AmmalRead card

Q1984

DriveHealth

Alice Ball isolated injectable ethyl esters from chaulmoogra oil, creating the most effective treatment available for Hansen's disease before antibiotics.

Chaulmoogra oil had long been used against leprosy, but swallowed doses caused nausea and raw injections were poorly absorbed. Working at the University of Hawaiʻi, Ball separated and modified its fatty acids into a form doctors could inject. She died at twenty-four before publishing; the method was promoted under another man's name until her authorship was recovered.

Alice BallRead card

Q1985

WonderScience

Gladys West's satellite-data calculations refined mathematical models of Earth's shape, work that became foundational to the accuracy of GPS.

At the U.S. Navy's Dahlgren laboratory, West programmed computers to process satellite observations and helped refine the geoid, reference ellipsoid and satellite-orbit models. The geoid follows a gravity-shaped mean sea level; the ellipsoid supplies a clean mathematical reference; orbit calculations locate spacecraft relative to Earth. Together, those geodetic frameworks helped make satellite positioning accurate. Decades before a phone could locate itself, her calculations gave satellites a more exact planet to work from.

Gladys WestRead card

Q1986

DriveSpace

Dorothy Vaughan led NACA's segregated West Area Computers, then mastered FORTRAN and prepared her colleagues for NASA's shift from human to electronic computing.

In 1949 Vaughan became NACA's first Black supervisor, managing mathematicians whose hand calculations supported aeronautical research. As electronic computers arrived, she learned FORTRAN and built programming expertise across the group, helping colleagues prepare for new roles as NASA integrated its computing divisions. She later contributed to the Scout launch vehicle. Her distinction was not personal adaptability alone; she turned foresight into collective preparation.

Dorothy VaughanRead card

Q1987

DriveBiography

Mary Jackson petitioned the City of Hampton to attend graduate courses held at a segregated white school, then became NASA's first Black woman engineer in 1958.

Jackson entered Langley's segregated West Area Computing unit in 1951, then moved into experiments in a supersonic pressure tunnel. Her training route required after-hours mathematics and physics classes in a school she was legally barred from attending without special approval. She went on to publish research on airflow and boundary layers at supersonic speeds. Later, she accepted a lower grade to manage equal-opportunity programmes, trading personal rank for the power to widen other people's routes upward.

Mary JacksonRead card

Q1988

DriveBiography

Christine Darden developed computer models for predicting and reducing sonic booms, helping engineers reshape supersonic aircraft to soften their acoustic impact.

Darden arrived at NASA Langley in 1967 as a human computer, one of the last generation hired to perform calculations for engineers. Six years later she moved into aerospace engineering and wrote code to model the shock waves that gather into a sonic boom. Her work helped show that noise on the ground could be influenced by an aircraft's geometry rather than accepted as the fixed price of speed. She eventually led the sonic-boom group: the person once assigned the arithmetic came to shape the research question.

Christine DardenRead card

Q1989

DriveBiography

Annie Easley moved from hand calculation to programming, developing and testing code for energy systems, battery research and NASA's Centaur upper-stage rocket.

Easley joined the aircraft engine laboratory in Cleveland in 1955 as one of only four Black employees, calculating research problems by hand. As electronic computers took over, she learned FORTRAN and SOAP rather than letting automation define the edge of her career. Her code supported studies of alternative power and the liquid-hydrogen Centaur stage that sent spacecraft toward the Moon and planets. Adaptability here was not a slogan; it was a new syntax learned while the workplace itself was changing.

Annie EasleyRead card

Q1990

DriveBiography

Evelyn Boyd Granville helped formulate orbit calculations and computer procedures for Projects Vanguard and Mercury, then contributed mathematical support to Apollo-era work.

Granville earned her Yale doctorate in 1949, becoming one of the first Black women in the United States to receive a PhD in mathematics. At IBM's Vanguard Computing Center she worked where celestial mechanics met early electronic programming, translating trajectories into procedures a machine could execute during the opening years of the space age. She later returned to the classroom for a long career in mathematics education. Her work moved in both directions: equations carried vehicles upward, and teaching carried knowledge forward.

Evelyn Boyd GranvilleRead card

Q1991

WonderBiography

Radia Perlman's spanning-tree algorithm lets network bridges agree on a loop-free path, blocking redundant links until a failure makes one useful again.

Redundant connections make a network resilient, but unmanaged loops can make frames circulate and multiply until communication collapses. Perlman's 1980s algorithm lets distributed switches elect a logical tree, temporarily quieting selected links while preserving them as alternative routes. If the topology changes, the tree can be calculated again. The elegance is institutional as much as mathematical: no central traffic officer is required, yet independent machines arrive at one workable map.

Radia PerlmanRead card

Q1992

WonderBiography

Maryam Mirzakhani won the 2014 Fields Medal for breakthroughs in the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces, becoming its first woman recipient.

A Riemann surface can be imagined as a flexible curved world, while its moduli space records the many forms such a world can take. Mirzakhani connected geometry, topology, probability and dynamical systems to count paths and reveal order in those spaces. She was known for working across large sheets of paper, drawing and revising until the problem became a landscape. The medal marked a historic first; the mathematics changed what others could see.

Maryam MirzakhaniRead card

Q1993

WonderBiography

Ingrid Daubechies constructed compactly supported orthonormal wavelets that made multiscale signal analysis practical for digital compression, denoising and reconstruction.

A Fourier analysis tells which frequencies exist, but wavelets can also preserve where a brief change or sharp edge occurs. Daubechies found finite, mathematically exact families that could be computed efficiently and reconstruct the original signal. Their descendants live in JPEG 2000, fingerprint storage, medical imaging and scientific data. Her abstraction succeeds because it is selective without being careless: it gives smooth areas less attention and spends detail where the world changes.

Ingrid DaubechiesRead card

Q1994

WonderBiography

Karen Uhlenbeck developed foundational methods in modern geometric analysis and gauge theory—work that made her the first woman to receive the Abel Prize in 2019.

Geometric equations can behave beautifully until energy concentrates and a sequence of smooth objects develops a singular point. Uhlenbeck's compactness and regularity ideas showed how to control that failure, preserving structure away from the places where a bubble forms. Those tools crossed between partial differential equations, geometry and mathematical physics. Her work did not remove every singularity; it made the moment of breakdown precise enough to become knowledge.

Karen UhlenbeckRead card

Q1995

DriveBiography

Fe del Mundo founded the Philippines' first pediatric hospital in 1957 and built programmes that carried child healthcare, training and disease prevention beyond its walls.

Del Mundo returned from postgraduate training in the United States as war reached the Philippines and cared for sick children in an internment camp. Frustrated by the limits of public institutions, she sold property to open the Children's Memorial Hospital in Quezon City, then linked specialist care with rural health workers and rehydration teams. She researched infectious disease, trained generations of clinicians and wrote a foundational Philippine pediatrics text. Her hospital was a building; her real design was a network of care.

Fe del MundoRead card

Q1996

DriveBiography

Jane C. Wright compared patients' responses with tests on their cultured tumour tissue, helping turn chemotherapy from a last gamble into a systematic field of cancer medicine.

At Harlem Hospital's Cancer Research Foundation, Wright and her father Louis grew samples of human tumours and exposed them to candidate drugs, then compared the laboratory response with what happened in the patient. She went on to investigate drug combinations, build a cross-referenced record of cancers and treatments, and develop catheter techniques for delivering potent agents to deep tumours. In a discipline still proving that medicines could treat cancer at all, she made response something to observe, compare and learn from.

Jane C. WrightRead card

Q1997

DriveBiography

Percy Lavon Julian achieved the first total synthesis of physostigmine, then devised industrial routes from soybean sterols to affordable starting materials for steroid medicines.

In 1935 Julian and Josef Pikl completed the total synthesis of physostigmine, making a scarce Calabar-bean compound more available for glaucoma treatment. At Glidden, Julian later recognised that water seeping into a vast soybean-oil tank had concentrated valuable sterols in a white deposit. He turned that accident into a production process whose intermediates fed the manufacture of progesterone and corticosteroid medicines. Laboratories had repeatedly closed doors to him because he was Black; he answered by opening routes through molecules at industrial scale.

Percy Lavon JulianRead card

Q1999

WonderBiography

Annie Jump Cannon classified more than 350,000 stellar spectra and refined the O-B-A-F-G-K-M sequence that became the enduring framework of spectral classification.

At Harvard College Observatory, women hired as 'computers' read glass plates while men commonly received the titles and telescopes. Cannon pared a tangled set of spectral classes into a clear sequence based on recurring features in starlight; later work showed that her order also runs from hotter stars toward cooler ones. Her speed was legendary, but the achievement was not mere sorting. By making hundreds of thousands of observations comparable, she turned an archive into an instrument for asking how stars differ and evolve.

Annie Jump CannonRead card

Q2000

DriveBiography

Gertrude B. Elion and George Hitchings designed drugs around biochemical differences between healthy cells and their targets, establishing principles of rational drug development.

Elion joined Hitchings at Burroughs Wellcome in 1944 and learned across chemistry, microbiology, pharmacology and virology. Their teams made analogues that could interrupt the metabolism of a tumour, microbe or immune cell more selectively than blind screening allowed. That programme yielded 6-mercaptopurine for leukaemia, azathioprine for transplantation, allopurinol for gout and later work central to acyclovir for herpes viruses. Her 1988 Nobel Prize honoured a method larger than any one medicine: begin with how life works, then design the interruption.

Gertrude B. ElionRead card

Q2002

WonderScience

A scanning tunnelling microscope maps a conducting surface by holding an atom-sharp tip extremely close and measuring the quantum current that tunnels across the gap.

Classically, electrons in the sample and tip should remain separated by the vacuum barrier. Quantum mechanics gives their wave-like probability a small reach beyond it, creating a tunnelling current that changes steeply with distance. As feedback raises and lowers the tip to keep that current steady, the motion becomes a map of the surface's electronic topography. Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer turned this effect into an instrument at IBM Zurich, earning a share of the 1986 Physics Nobel Prize. Near enough, a forbidden crossing becomes a ruler.

Scanning tunnelling microscopeRead card

Q2004

WonderScience

Electron microscopes use short-wavelength electron beams and electromagnetic lenses to resolve structures far smaller than visible-light microscopy can distinguish.

A light microscope loses resolving power when the details approach the wavelength of its illumination. Electrons also behave as waves, but accelerated electrons can have much shorter wavelengths. Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll used magnetic coils to focus them; their 1931 prototype led to Ruska's 1933 instrument that surpassed optical resolution. Modern transmission instruments send electrons through very thin specimens, while scanning designs read signals from surfaces. The images require vacuum, preparation and interpretation, yet they opened cells, viruses and materials far beyond the frontier of glass lenses.

Electron microscopeRead card

Q2005

WonderScience

Mass spectrometry ionizes a sample, separates the resulting ions by mass-to-charge ratio and records their abundance, producing spectra that can reveal compounds, isotopes and molecular structure.

The instrument is no microscopic weighing pan. An ion source gives atoms or molecules charge; an analyser sorts their paths or flight times; a detector counts what arrives. Some methods preserve large molecules, while others break them into informative fragments. A mass-to-charge value narrows identity but rarely announces it: the peaks become evidence through calibration, chemistry and reference spectra.

Mass spectrometryRead card

Q2008

WonderScience

Photogrammetry finds matching points in overlapping photographs and uses camera geometry and parallax to calculate distance, shape and three-dimensional coordinates.

A feature shifts within an image when the camera moves; that apparent disagreement carries geometric information. With known or recoverable camera positions, software traces corresponding points through several views and triangulates where they sit in space. The result may be a map, a building survey, a terrain model or a record of an object too fragile to touch. Here the camera is a measuring instrument disguised as an image-maker.

PhotogrammetryRead card

Q2009

WonderTechnology

Lidar times the return of laser pulses to build three-dimensional point clouds; pulses reaching ground through canopy gaps can expose subtle terrain and archaeological landscapes hidden by vegetation.

A lidar instrument sends rapid pulses and converts each round-trip travel time into distance. Aircraft or satellites repeat the measurement millions of times, assembling a point cloud of roofs, branches and ground. The light does not pass through solid leaves; enough pulses find small openings for analysts to separate canopy returns from terrain. Remove the digital forest and old roads, terraces or foundations can emerge without a spade entering the soil.

LidarRead card

Q2012

WonderScience

A Kibble balance realizes the kilogram by balancing weight against electromagnetic force measured with quantum electrical standards tied to the fixed value of Planck's constant.

The balance works in two linked modes. One matches a mass's weight with magnetic force on a current-carrying coil; the other moves the coil to calibrate the same system through induced voltage. Quantum standards make the electrical measurements traceable to Planck's constant, whose value was fixed in the 2019 SI. A suitably equipped metrology institute can now realize mass from a reproducible recipe instead of comparing everything to one ageing object.

Kibble balanceRead card

Move into another roomStillnessLet the noise settle.