In honour of International Women's Day, I bring to your attention a fascinating recent piece in The Conversation, Who was Amelia Frank? The life of a forgotten physicist, by Peter Jacobson and Beck Wise.
Amelia Frank was a PhD student of John Van Vleck. Her work was cited by him in his 1977 Nobel Lecture. In the early days of quantum theory, she explained deviations of the magnetic moments of the rare earth ions Sm3+ and Eu3+ from Hund's rule predictions. Tragically, she died from cancer when she was only 31.
