"The most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy"

"The reward of the young scientist is the...thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something.... The reward of the old scientist is the sense of having seen a vague sketch grow into a masterly landscape.... He may have roughed out part of the design, laid on a few strokes, but he has learned to accept the discoveries of others with the same delight that he experienced in his own when he was young." Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Payne-Gaposchkin's Ph.D. dissertation entitled "Stellar Atmospheres, A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars," was reportedly the best written on astronomy in the entire 20th century, according to noted astronomer Otto Struve. Stellar atmospheres, The Observatory, 1925; Harvard College Observatory, Monographs, no. 1.

Winner of the American Astronomical Society's Henry Norris Russell Prize in 1976, the British-American scientist achieved numerous firsts, including:

• first woman to become a full professor at Harvard
• first woman to become a department chair at Harvard
  
• first person to receive a Ph.D. in astronomy from either Radcliffe or Harvard
• first to show that the sun is composed primarily of hydrogen
  

For more information, see the website "4000 Years of Women in Science" at
http://www.astr.ua.edu/4000WS/4000WS.html
http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/payne2.html