Dame Kathleen Lonsdale (1903-71) was an Irish pacifist, prison reformer and crystallographer. She was one of the first two women elected as Fellows of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1945, the first woman tenured professor at University College London, first woman president of the International Union of Crystallography and first woman president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning - sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children's books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She has written some very long books (Figuring and Traversal) and some very short books (The Snail with the Right Heart and The Coziest Place on the Moon), and her show The Universe in Verse - a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry - has also become a book the length of a day on Saturn.