@Earl-of-Trumps saidWhat does washing hogs have to do with women scientists being suprressed?
Hogwash!!
@sonhouse saidI should have used the /sarc tag
What does washing hogs have to do with women scientists being suprressed?
In 1976, a Black woman opened a restaurant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with just sixty-four dollars in her pocket.
The space was empty. The stoves were cold. There was not enough money to prepare a full day’s menu. So she made a decision.
She would start with breakfast.
Her name was Mildred Council. Most people knew her as Dip, a nickname from her childhood on a farm in Chatham County, where she could reach deeper into the water barrel than anyone else.
The path that led her to that empty kitchen had taken decades.
Her mother died when she was two. Her father raised seven children on a tenant farm, teaching them how to grow food, stretch what they had, and survive through the seasons. She learned to cook by watching the women around her, measuring without tools, judging heat by instinct, understanding food through experience rather than instruction.
By the time she stood holding the keys to that building on West Rosemary Street, she had spent years cooking in other people’s kitchens. She had worked in local restaurants and for university houses, but ownership had never been offered.
Now she had a lease.
The building was worn. The floors were marked. The equipment was unreliable. But it was hers.
She did not go to a bank.
She went to the grocery store.
With sixty-four dollars in her purse, she walked through the aisles, selecting eggs, flour, bacon, and grits. She kept track of every price in her head. At the register, the total came to forty dollars.
She paid.
She kept the remaining twenty-four dollars to make change for customers.
There was no margin for error.
She carried the groceries back, unlocked the door, turned on the lights, and started cooking. The first plates went out to working men and students looking for something simple and filling. She served them on plates she had brought from home.
They ate.
They paid.
The register filled.
Late in the morning, she took the money she had just earned and walked back to the store. This time she bought what she needed for lunch. Chicken, vegetables, flour, oil.
She returned and cooked again.
The lunch crowd came.
They ate.
They paid.
In the afternoon, she repeated the process. She used the money from lunch to buy what she needed for dinner.
She was not operating a business in the usual sense.
She was moving hour by hour, using what she earned to survive the next part of the day.
She did not have the resources to make it through the week.
So she made it through the morning.
On that first day, she earned one hundred and thirty-five dollars.
By the time she finished cleaning late that night, her feet were so swollen she could not put her shoes back on. She sat alone in the kitchen, soaking them in ice water before she could walk home.
She opened again the next day.
And the day after that.
Mama Dip’s Kitchen stayed open for decades.
Mildred Council became one of the most respected figures in Southern cooking. She wrote cookbooks. She served national leaders. She gave jobs to people who were often turned away elsewhere.
When she died in 2018, the restaurant had grown into something far larger than that original space.
The first building was eventually gone.
A historical marker stands nearby now, listing her name and her achievements.
It does not mention the sixty-four dollars.
Or the forty-dollar breakfast.
Or the three trips to the store in a single day.
But that is where it began.
Mildred Council built something lasting.
One meal at a time.
Starting with breakfast.
In 1960, a quiet woman at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was handed a routine file. It was for a drug already sold in nearly 50 countries—a sedative called thalidomide, widely marketed as safe for pregnant women.
Most people would have signed off. Frances Oldham Kelsey didn’t.
New to the FDA, she noticed something others had overlooked—or ignored. The data was thin. Reports of nerve damage were buried. The safety claims felt… too clean. While the pharmaceutical company pushed aggressively for approval, sending repeated requests and mounting pressure, Kelsey held her ground. She asked for more studies. Then more. And more.
Behind the scenes, the pressure wasn’t subtle. Drug companies expected quick approvals. Delays meant lost profit. For a young female reviewer in a male-dominated system, saying “no” wasn’t just professional resistance—it was personal risk. She was challenging an industry that wasn’t used to being challenged, especially not by a woman.
Then the truth surfaced.
Across Europe, thousands of babies were being born with devastating deformities—missing limbs, malformed organs—traced back to thalidomide taken during pregnancy. It became one of the worst medical disasters of the 20th century.
Because Kelsey refused to approve it, the United States was largely spared.
Her skepticism saved countless lives.
In 1962, she was awarded the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service by John F. Kennedy—one of the highest honors a civilian could receive. But her impact didn’t stop there. Her stand forced sweeping changes in drug regulation, leading to stricter testing requirements and proof of efficacy before approval. The system became safer because she refused to bend.
She didn’t shout. She didn’t grandstand. She simply refused to compromise when it mattered most.
And that’s what made her dangerous—in the best possible way.
© Women In World History
An MIT professor taught the same math course for 62 years, and the day he retired, students from every country on earth showed up online to watch him give his final lecture.
I opened the playlist at 2am and ended up watching three of them back to back.
His name is Gilbert Strang. The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra.
Every machine learning engineer, every data scientist, every quant, every self-taught programmer who actually understands how AI works learned the math from this one man. Most of them never set foot on MIT's campus. They just opened a free playlist on YouTube and let him teach.
Here's the story almost nobody tells you.
Strang joined the MIT math faculty in 1962. He retired in 2023. That is 61 years of standing at the same chalkboard teaching the same subject to 18-year-olds.
The interesting part is what he did when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002. Most professors were skeptical. They worried that putting their lectures online would make their classrooms irrelevant. Strang did not hesitate. He said his life's mission was to open mathematics to students everywhere. He filmed every lecture and gave it away.
The decision quietly changed how the world learns math.
For decades linear algebra was taught the wrong way. Professors started with abstract vector spaces and proofs about field axioms. Students drowned in the abstraction. Most never recovered. They walked out believing they were bad at math when they had simply been taught in an order that nobody's brain is built to absorb.
Strang inverted the entire curriculum.
He started with matrix multiplication. Something you can write down on paper. Something you can compute by hand. Something you can see. Then he showed his students that everything else in linear algebra eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, orthogonality, the four fundamental subspaces was just a different lens for understanding what the matrix was actually doing under the hood.
His rule was strict. If a student could not explain a concept using a concrete 3 by 3 example, that student did not actually understand the concept yet. The abstraction was supposed to come last, not first. The intuition was the foundation. The proofs were just confirmation that the intuition was correct.
The second thing Strang changed was the classroom itself. He said please and thank you to his students. Every single lecture. He paused mid-derivation to ask "am I OK?" to check if anyone was lost. He never used the word "obviously" or "trivially" because he knew exactly what those words do to a student who is one step behind. He treated 19-year-olds learning math for the first time the way he treated his own colleagues. With patience. With respect. With the assumption that they belonged in the room.
For 62 years.
The result is something that has never happened in the history of education. A single math professor became the default teacher of his subject for the entire planet.
Universities in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, every country with a computer science department, started telling their own students to just watch Strang's lectures. The University of Illinois revised its linear algebra course to do almost no in-person lecturing. The reason was honest. The professor said they could not compete with the videos.
His final lecture was in May 2023.
The auditorium was packed with students who had never met him before. He walked to the chalkboard, taught for an hour, and at the end the entire room stood and applauded. He looked confused for a moment, like he genuinely did not understand why they were cheering. Then he smiled and waved them off and walked out.
His written comment under the YouTube video of that final lecture was four sentences long. He said teaching had been a wonderful life. He said he was grateful to everyone who saw the importance of linear algebra. He said the movement of teaching it well would continue because it was right.
That was it. No book promotion. No farewell speech. No legacy management.
The man whose teaching is the foundation of modern AI just thanked the audience and went home.
20 million views. Zero ego. The entire engine of the AI revolution sits on top of math that millions of people learned for free from one quiet professor in Cambridge.
The course is still on MIT OpenCourseWare. Every lecture, every problem set, every exam, every solution. Free.
The most important math course of the 21st century is sitting one click away from you. Most people will never open it.
Anna Julia Cooper entered the world on August 10, 1858, in Raleigh, North Carolina—owned, not free. Her mother, Hannah, was enslaved. Her father was believed to be the very man who claimed ownership over them.
That was her starting point.
But Anna refused to stay where history placed her.
After emancipation, she fought for an education in a world that didn’t believe Black women needed one. At St. Augustine’s, she challenged the system directly—demanding the same classical curriculum as men. Not a simplified version. Not a “suitable” one. The same.
She won.
She went on to teach, lead, and eventually became principal of the prestigious M Street High School in Washington, D.C.—transforming it into one of the most academically rigorous Black schools in the country. So rigorous, in fact, that white officials pushed back. They thought she was “over-educating” Black students.
She refused to lower the bar.
At an age when most people had long stopped chasing anything new, Anna did something almost unthinkable—she earned her Ph.D. from the Sorbonne in Paris at 66 years old, becoming one of the first Black women in history to do it.
And through it all, she wrote.
In A Voice from the South (1892), she made something clear that still echoes today:
“The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect… it is the cause of humankind.”
Those words didn’t stay on a page.
They became part of how America presents itself to the world—printed in U.S. passports, carried across borders, stamped into history.
Anna Julia Cooper lived 105 years.
She survived slavery.
She outlived systems built to silence her.
And she turned her voice into something no one could erase.
© Women In World History
#archaeohistories
@rookie54
Things that really impressed me about her, and they are not necessarily academic:
"she challenged the system directly—demanding the same classical curriculum as men. Not a simplified version.
Not a “suitable” one. The same." - WINNER!
"She refused to lower the bar." - WINNER!
"she earned her Ph.D. from the Sorbonne in Paris at 66 years old, becoming one of the first Black women in history to do it." - WINNER!
"The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect… it is the cause of humankind.” - The BEST!!
It's not your aptitude that counts, it's your *attitude*.
This woman is awesome