The truth, Trig, is as follows:
I am a very smart woman
<snip>
Oxymoron!
Hypatia of Alexandria (370-415): Egyptian mathematician and astronomer, for many years head of Plato's School of Philosophy, credited with discoveries on the movements of the planets and with inventing the hydrometer (a device still used today to measure the density of liquids).
Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603): queen of England and according to the historian David Loades in a recent biography, the "best educated woman of her generation". She could speak and write French, Greek, Italian and Latin as well as English, she was an expert diplomat and politician and an influential speaker. Pope Sixtus V said of her that “she is only a woman, only mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire, by all.”
Caroline Hershel (1750-1848) German-born English astronomer: co-discoverer of the planet Uranus; discovered several comets (the first woman to do so). First female recipient of the Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal for her work on cataloguing stars. (The next woman to be awarded it was Vera Rubin, in the 1990s.)
Mary Somerville (1780-1872) Scottish astronomer, mathematician and geographer. She and Caroline Herschel were the first women admitted to the Royal Astronomical Society. Among the influential books she wrote are Connection of the Physical Sciences and Molecular and Microscopic Science.
Marie Curie (1867-1934): Polish-born French physicist and chemist, the only winner of Nobel prizes in two different disciplines (Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911), first female professor appointed by the Sorbonne University and founder of the scientific research centre now called the Institut Curie; famous also for her research into radioactivity (a word she invented) and discovery of the elements radium and polonium.
Henrietta Leavitt (1868-1921): American astronomer, who cracked the problem of how to measure interstellar distances (using the trackable brightness of particular stars, called “cepheids”, which she discovered.) Because of her discoveries, the universe was suddenly found to be hundreds of times bigger than previously thought.
France Cordova (born 1947): French-born Mexican-American astrophysicist. The youngest person (and first woman) to be appointed Chief Scientist at NASA and winner of NASA’s highest accolade, the Distinguished Service Medal. She has published more than 150 scientific papers. Last year, she was made president of Purdue University.
Those are a few examples though
