Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Henrietta Swan Leavitt, one of the women employed as computers at Harvard College Observatory, published in 1912 the relationship between the brightness and pulsation period of Cepheid variable stars. It became the yardstick Edwin Hubble used to measure distances to other galaxies. She was paid little and died in 1921; a Swedish mathematician tried to nominate her for a Nobel prize in 1925, unaware she had died.