Leavitt, Henrietta Swan

Born at Lancaster, MA; hearing deteriorated while at Oberlin College, then she switched to Radcliffe College, studying astronomy and graduating in 1892. Worked at the Harvard College Observatory, where she undertook major projects and discovered several new astronomical bodies. Her most famous discovery was of the periodic luminosity of certain stars (Cepheid variables), of which she eventually discovered 2400. A Swedish mathematician nominated her for a Nobel Prize for formulating the law relating the period and luminosity of stars, unaware that she had died of cancer four years before. A crater on the Moon's far side is named in her honor. Biography is Miss Leavitt's Stars (2005).