Description
"Inge Lehmann is one of the most important female scientists in history, yet it's likely that interested readers have never heard of her. She was a Danish seismologist and geophysicist who made the groundbreaking discovery in 1936 that Earth has a solid inner core. This would forever change our understanding of our own planet. In an era when women researchers were not always taken seriously, Inge Lehmann displayed exceptional genius and had to forge her own path. Her personal life (all 104 years of it!) was equally captivating and shrouded in mystery until now. She lived and worked in the United States for a significant portion of her life and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Columbia University in 1964; in 1971 she became the first woman to receive the William Bowie Medal, the highest honor given by the American Geophysical Union. Surprisingly, no books about this remarkable woman have been published in the US market. It is long overdue for her extraordinary story to be told. At the heart of this first biography of Inge Lehmann is her personal correspondence, made available to author Hanna Strager through Lehmann's great-nephew. Inge Lehmann never married and didn't have any children. Her great-nephew reports that she lived alone all her life. Yet, in a dusty cardboard box filled with her letters and stowed away in the attic of his house, Strager discovered the first page of a love letter discussing plans for Inge Lehmann and the letter's writer to move in together. The unsigned letter and the detective work to identify its writer frames this portrait of Inge Lehmann and her life. In the epilogue of the biography, the writer is identified as Florence Sykes, a British woman whom Inge Lehmann had known for 25 years at the time of the writing. The story of Inge Lemann's life is a universal tale of an extraordinary woman's struggle to find her footing in life and a path to thrive intellectually and personally"--
