An interesting read about Inge Lehmann

A young Inge Lehmann.

Inge Lehmann lived a long life from May 13th, 1888 to February 21st, 1993. She was a Danish seismologist who discovered the Earth’s inner core. In 1936 she postulated from existing seismic data that the Earth’s core is not a single molten sphere, but that an inner core exists, which has physical properties that are different from those in the outer core.

A recent tribute has been published in Scientific American blog by Dana Hunter: Inge Lehmann: A Small Solid Core in the Innermost Part of the Earth. Through a search on the web, one can easily find various articles and memoires she wrote about her career. For example on EOS: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/EO068i003p00033-02/abstract or  on Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society http://www.jstor.org/stable/770337

Amidst today’s advances, one should celebrate  the creativity and ideas that emerged over the years, decades and centuries ago, which, despite the limitations at those times, one still came to proper conclusions that  helped us understand how things work around us.

Illustrating how seismic rays propagate inside the Earth’s inner layers

In the case of Inge Lehmann, she also had to fight social stereo-types and prejudice, which unfortunately might still be the case for some people: “No difference between the intellect of boys and girls was recognized, a fact that brought some disappointment later in life when I had to recognize that this was not the general attitude,”