Born: 1935, Unknown
Died: Unknown
Country most active: Russia
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
The 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Harold W. Kroto, Robert F. Curl, and Richard E. Smalley for their landmark paper on the experimental production and observation of buckminsterfullerene, or C60—a substance made up of molecules composed of 60 carbon atoms. The soccer ball-like structure of C60 means that it can interact with other substances in a variety of unique ways, and applications for C60 and other fullerenes range from biomedical to nanotechnology to solar energy cells. But 12 years before the men’s paper was published in 1985, Russian Academy of Sciences computational chemist Elena Galpern made the first computational prediction of C60’s stable structure. Her paper was published in Russia in 1973. “If you live in a closed society,” observed Magdolna Hargittai of Budapest University of Technology & Economics, “where there used to be little opportunity for interaction with world scientists, there is a big chance that if you discover something important, its significance will be lost.”