In five pages this important American female astronomer and her 222 variable stars' study of 1907 are discussed. One visual and five sources are cited in the bibliography.
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lists 5 sources 1 visual. BBflmngR.doc WILLIAMINA PATON STEVENS FLEMING (1857-1911) Written by B. Bryan Babcock for the Paperstore, Inc., November 2000 Introduction In
1906, Mina Fleming was the first American woman elected to the Royal Astronomical Society. In 1907 she published a study of 222 variable stars she had discovered. A British astronomer
made the following observation: "Many astronomers are deservedly proud to have discovered one...the discovery of 222...is an achievement bordering on the marvelous!" Early Life Mina Stevens Fleming, the first
to discover stars called "white dwarfs", was born May 15, 1857 in Dundee, Scotland. She attended public schools in Dundee and then taught in Dundee from age fourteen until her
marriage to James Fleming in 1877. The couple moved to Boston when she was twenty-one. A year later, while pregnant, she was deserted by her husband. To support herself and
the baby, Mina Fleming obtained work as a maid in the home of Prof. Edward Pickering, the director of the Harvard Observatory (Bois ppg). Harvard Observatory Professor Pickering was unhappy
with the work performed by his male employees and in either an angry fit, or a stroke of fate, declared that his maid could do a better job than they
did. In order to prove his point he actually brought Fleming into the lab, and later hired her in a clerical capacity. In 1881, mathematical calculations, were added to
her clerical work at the Observatory. Fleming soon proved that she was also capable of doing more than the work originally assigned (Bois ppg). She first set up
her own system of classifying stars according to their spectra, a distinctive pattern produced by each star when its light is passed through a prism. It is recorded that Fleming