ThinkHer

In the world of higher education, knowledge is often separated into two approaches: the deep and the broad. The former focuses on a single discipline—often associated with the sciences—while the latter encourages connections across fields, a style more familiar to the arts and humanities. Science, in this model, becomes a specialized, linear pursuit, while the liberal arts embrace breadth and interdisciplinarity. Dr. Purnima Sinha’s life and work defied these binaries. Purnima Sinha with  Prof SN Bose and Prof. PAM Dirac (top right), playing tabla (top left), with students (bottom left), and Dr. Sinha's PhD Thesis (bottom right)  ©  www.peepultree.world Emerging in the early decades of postcolonial India, she worked in X-ray crystallography—a field  of modern physics that analyze the structure of various materials—and became t he first woman from Calcutta University to earn a PhD in Physics. Howe ver,   her understanding of science transcended its disciplinary s...

Who do you think was the first to be called a scientist? Albert Einstein? Issac Newton? Galileo Galilei or Nicolaus Copernicus? When we asked ChatGPT to generate an image of a scientist, it produced a depiction of a man wearing geeky glasses and a lab coat. The irony is, the term 'scientist' was first used to describe a woman, Mary Somerville in the year 1834. William Whemwell introduced the term 'Scientist' as a joke while reviewing the book 'On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences' written by Mary Somerville. It was her fourth book and one of the first books to be popular in the science genre. The reviewer, William Whemwell was marveled by its writing and described it to be 'Masterly'. Not so surprisingly, he couldn't get over the fact that a woman could write so fabulously about science. He writes, some women had even advanced so far in philosophy as to ‘ look with dry eyes upon oxygen and hydrogen, to hear with tranquil minds of perturbations a...

In the 1980s, Carl Sagan’s popular TV series  Cosmos  introduced a new generation to Hypatia of Alexandria—a remarkable scholar, philosopher, and teacher. Sagan reminded viewers of her brilliance but also of her tragic death in 415 CE, a story that has grown to overshadow her life and intellectual contributions. Hypatia’s horrific end, dragged from her chariot and killed by a mob, is o ften recounted as the symbolic fall of the rational, philosophical traditions of ancient Greece. Sagan, among others, saw her death as marking the decline of the intellectual legacy of Alexandria, giving way to centuries of religious dominance over thought, often referred to as the “Dark Ages” in Europe. Hypatia, as painted by Raphae l But who was Hypatia beyond a martyr or a symbol of lost knowledge? What do we truly know about her life and work? To answer this, we must turn our attention to her story—not as legend, but as history. Born during a period of political and religious turmoil in Alex...