Soaring Achievers & How We Remember Them

There's so much more to this girl's journey into the center of the earth.

This 13-year-old is Inge Lehmann, from Copenhagen. It’s 1901. She definitely counts as a soaring achiever! Lehmann became a mathematician, and in her early 20s was employed in actuarial offices: She worked, in effect, as a human computer. Lehmann turned to the new scientific field of seismology, and in her 30s, upended what we knew about our planet’s interior.

She kept track of a vast amount of global seismic data on cardboard cards stored in oatmeal boxes at home, and pored over them in her off-duty time. Trying to make sense of seismic waves others had dismissed as seismographic errors, Lehmann figured out that the earth must have a sold inner core. Mind-blowing! Her data analysis and calculations showed why the first seismic waves from earthquakes, called P-waves, were showing up where and when they did on the other side of the world. Until Lehmann’s 1936 paper – called simply, P’ – it had been assumed the core of the earth was molten through and through.

In her 70s, she was studying seismic data from US nuclear tests, and identified another feature of the earth’s structure, over 200km below the surface. It’s one of a few known transitions between layers of the earth, called discontinuities. That one was named after her.

Lehmann won a slew of major science honors. She is the first woman awarded the prestigious William Bowie Medal from the American Geophysical Union, for example – and they now have an Inge Lehmann Medal. There’s a Danish science funding program named after her, and she’s the only woman to have a monument in front of the University of Copenhagen – hers is alongside the Danish famous physicist, Niels Bohr.

In 2015, Inge Lehmann was Google’s doodle for a day. And the little summary at Google is typical of the way the stories about her, and scientists generally, are told – a string of triumphs, like the one I just wrote. We hear about the discovery of the earth’s inner core. And this: “…educated at a very young age in a Copenhagen school that treated female and male students as absolute equals, she was a strong proponent of gender equality. Her pioneering spirit is an inspiration to us…”

The privilege of her progressive family is presumed to have been wind at her back. But it wasn’t only that. And the more complicated truth is far more important for us to understand.

Historian Lif Lund Jacobsen has written about Lehmann’s early life in the context of what we know female scientists of her generation faced. Lehmann’s family were, at times, part of the problem, too. When a mathematics teacher at her school saw how gifted she was and wanted to assign her extra tasks, her parents objected on the grounds that she was too weak and it would be too great a stress. Her father believed women’s intellect was equal to men’s, but women’s constitutions weren’t up to strenuous academic work. While supportive of her education, when she came home from a year at Cambridge utterly exhausted, he dissuaded her from pursuing academia: Hence the period of actuarial work.

What with one barrier and another, Lehmann never gained a senior academic post – and she was passed over for the University of Copenhagen’s first chair in geophysics in 1952. Recognition of her achievements didn’t come internationally till she was in her 60s – and even later in Denmark. She lived long enough to bask in it, thankfully. Lehmann got to enjoy a scientific meeting with international visitors celebrating her 100th birthday! She died aged 104, in 1993.

Lehmann didn’t think weakness was her problem, and her later life showed she was anything but: “I could have been stronger,” she said, “if I hadn't been so bored at school.” Her breakdown after her time at Cambridge, Jacobsen writes, “can be construed as an attempt to rectify gender bias via academic overcompensation.” Repeatedly, “she displayed a pragmatism that found hope in what was possible. By performing well within narrow parameters, she made the best of things in order to move up the career ladder.”

That was true of many women scientists of the time. And it’s still true – for women, and for many others from other under-represented groups in science. When we are struggling with defeats, unfairness, and our insecurities, knowing that people we admire also felt all that is important – and understanding why this happens is critical to changing inhospitable environments. Jacobsen says, “If we want to learn from exceptional individuals, we need to look at their failures as well as successes and at the social mechanisms surrounding science.”

If you’d like to know more about the amazing Inge Lehmann, her life, and her work, check out my new little thread, with photos across her life, and links to dig even further if you get fascinated. There are a couple of biographies, only in Danish, as far as I know.

Some bits of evidence and more that caught my eye this week follow my sign-off as usual – this time some food for thought about honing our skills at ignoring bad information, more research on improving systematic reviews, and crosswords! And I dug into the data on how the Mastodon migration from Twitter is going.

I hope you have a good week!

Hilda

Photo credit: The photo of young Inge Lehmann is CC-BY-NC-ND, via Europeana.

• This cartoon about Twitter comes from my new post at Absolutely Maybe, in which I dig into the data about the over 1 million people who rushed to join Mastodon in the first couple of weeks after the brutal and chaotic Musk takeover of Twitter. The #ScienceTwitter crowd has been a big mover – you might be surprised just how big: I was. Mapping the Mastodon Migration: Is It a One-Way Trip or an Each-Way Bet for Science Twitter?

• On a related subject, there was an important discussion in a paper by Anastasia Kozyreva from a Max Planck Institute center, and international colleagues. They argue that a vital skill we need in the digital environments we live in is honing “critical ignoring”. There are a few elements here, including lowering our exposure to distracting sources where the risk of being misled is very high (like Twitter!), and avoiding contact with malicious actors. It’s worth a read. One piece of advice pulled me up: “Do not use distractions as internal personal rewards.” I can see the point, I don’t agree with that, but I’ll keep thinking about it. 💯 for this, though:

  “It is only by ignoring the torrent of low-quality information that people can focus on applying critical search skills to the remaining now-manageable pool of potentially relevant information. As do all types of deliberate ignorance, critical ignoring requires cognitive and motivational resources (e.g., impulse control) and, somewhat ironically, knowledge: In order to know what to ignore, a person must first understand and detect the warning signs of low trustworthiness.”

• There was an interesting systematic review on a critical issue for people who do systematic reviews. Even getting 2 people to screen search results can mean something like 3% of eligible studies are missed: add another 10% if it's a single reviewer. These authors found 3 meta-research studies about the characteristics and/or recovery methods for those studies that get missed. Only one of them was strong methodologically, and the numbers are small. So it’s still early days for this subject. Mostly, it seems studies might be missed because their titles/abstracts aren't great. Another reason: non-English ones might be more likely to be overlooked. In one study, all the studies falsely excluded from searches were found when the reviewers searched the reference lists of the studies they did include. Diversity of search methods FTW!

• Finally, there was a spray of news reports that web-based crossword puzzles are better for maintaining cognitive function in old age than brain training computer games. I’m over 60 and do at least one crossword daily just because I like starting the day that way – and yes, I Wordle too. I’d be glad if it’s doing me some good. But I’m skeptical. I haven’t kept up with the brain training evidence lately – the last time I dug into it was for a debunking post about a study back in 2016.

  This new study turned out to be a trial randomizing older people with mild cognitive impairment to either a particular brand of specialized brain training games every day, or web-based crosswords. The researchers expected the specialized games to do better – but the people playing them did a little worse, and the people doing the crosswords did a bit better. This raises more questions than answers about crosswords, even for older people with mild cognitive impairment, never mind everybody else. So, expect more studies on daily crosswords!