Let N be the number of great scientists. It would be sensible for the curriculum to include the n greatest scientists, where n << N. Since Marie Curie always gets included in the textbooks, we can conclude either that she ranks as one of the n greatest scientists, even for very small n, or that the reasons for her inclusion go beyond her scientific accomplishments. Considering how few history textbooks mention (for example) Euler, Gauss, Lagrange, Laplace, Lavoisier, Faraday, Dirac, Onsager, or Landau---whose scientific accomplishments all rival or surpass Curie's---it's safe to conclude (as Paul did) that the textbook writers include some non-scientific factors when deciding which scientists to include.

Let's face it: almost no one reading this knows who the hell Onsager and Landau are---but you probably should. (They were both giants of 20th-century physics.) No one disputes that Marie Curie was a great scientist, but that's not enough to account for her ubiquity in the textbooks. And since the most significant diff between Curie and Landau is gender, it's accurate to say that Curie gets included because she was female.

I don't think anyone is trying to deny that Curie gets a little more attention in the school curriculum and the popular mind just because she's a woman, but I think the point asnyder was making is that she at least has the distinction of being a great scientist, unlike George Washington Carver who (and I had to look him up, since having not been educated in the US I'd never really heard of this guy) doesn't seem to be in that category.

Oh, and be careful with statements like "almost no one reading this knows who the hell Onsager and Landau are". There's a surprisingly large number of physicists reading this board.

We aren't talking about the users of this board, we are talking about the average American who went through the public education system. 99.9% of them have heard of George Washington Carver, but not of Onsager and Landau.

Oh, I interpreted "almost no one reading this knows..." as referring to the users of this board.

Your original interpretation was right. Perhaps I underestimated the number of physicists hanging out here. (I hope so! It would be cool to think people here know who these guys are.) In any case, the original point remains: even on Hacker News, Marie Curie is far better-known than Lev Landau, and it's not because she was the greater scientist.

I am not a physicist, and I have not heard of either of those guys, but I've heard of Curie and Carver.

I have a Landau book in my hands right now ;)

She also died as a result of her research. She carried glowing vials of radioactive goo in her pockets! I don't care what gender or race your are, her life is just a great story that is interesting as well as informative. This may have something to do with her ubiquity in addition to her gender.

I'm sorry I don't know what these "points" mean. Please don't take whatever points are shown with my comment seriously: it's just the default value.

I think Paul Dirac is insufficiently praised not only in the layman's world, but even in the scientific community. Although he was a contemporary of Albert Einstein and although his contributions were comparably important and various, Einstein enjoys a rock-star-like status, whereas Dirac is quite inadequately acknowledged.

The same would hold for Arnold Sommerfeld, Leonhard Euler and many others, some of whose names and contributions I perhaps don't know about.

Curie is included to inspire girls to become scientists. The textbooks provide both a record of history, and role models for students.

I'm not entirely convinced that record-keeping should trump role models.

You forgot to mention Turing :) Turing doesnt get much space in school textbooks. And von Neumann too despite being one of the giants of mathematics in 20th century.

Wow, my list really should have included von Neumann, perhaps the most underrated intellect of the 20th century. He'd be on a lot of people's top-n list even for n <= 3, and yet he's barely known outside of the technical world.

Let's add Alonzo Church to that list.

Indeed - Curie was most definitely "the shit", and that shouldn't be taken away from her.

However, it is also almost certainly true that she was taught because she was female. Now, I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing.

I would, in fact, suggest an addition to PG's categories of lies: "Making kids think things are easier than they are".

No-one knows better than PG, living in the start-up world, that Big Things are often only even attempted because the people involved didn't realise how incredibly difficult they would turn out to be. If a child had been taught, truthfully, about the obstacles to succeeding as (say) a woman in science, that could well be one of the biggest things she learns from early science lessons. Layer this up over the next five to ten years, and how likely is she to go for that physics class - or even think she wants to?

Some of these lies are to tell kids that the world is as we wish it were, in the hope that they will grow up with these expectations and thereby make it so.

"Making kids think things are easier than they are"

Probably the most important lie I've unraveled in my mind over the last couple years reading experiences from real people (pg, etc) and things like "Myths of Innovation", etc.

This is ESPECIALLY dangerous if you (or your kids) are smart. If you're fairly smart, then school is easy. It's easy, so you never fail, so you never understand that many things (including most worth doing) are hard.

It's not just that they're "hard"...it's that things are usually downright unfair. We never really teach children the essential role of luck in success, and how you can be the best by every objective metric, yet still fail because of phenomena that are outside of your control.

"This is ESPECIALLY dangerous if you (or your kids) are smart. If you're fairly smart, then school is easy. It's easy, so you never fail, so you never understand that many things (including most worth doing) are hard."

Add to that parents who keep telling their smart kids how they expect them to do well, that they can be and do anything they want in life, etc., and the amount of personal disappointment these kids face when life turns out to be more than just doing well on your SATs.

I've taken great care (and gotten my wife on board too) to change the way we praise our older girl. When she does something new, we no longer say "Wow, you're so smart!" - we say "Wow, that was great how you worked hard and kept trying until you succeeded!".

In case others need some help persuading, here is the link to that recent Scientific American article to that effect ( http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-sm... )

nice - a small but important distinctions, I'm going to use something similar.

"However, it is also almost certainly true that she was taught because she was female"

This is actually not the case. In fact, she was repeatedly denied entry into universities and had to fight especially hard for any education or appointments that she recieved.

At first, I also misread this sentence in the way that you have. :)

What the sentence means to say is "It is also almost certainly true that students were taught about Curie because she was female."

Ah, yes -- on a related note, this is what I've seen as the function of "political correctness" (at sensible levels... it can obviously be carried to counterproductive extremes).

We lie about how racist, bigoted, homophobic, etc. the general public is (and try to browbeat them into lying as well), in the hopes that our kids will be less so.

Was her work more important than Newton's, Darwin's, or Watson's? I'm not questioning that she was a great scientist. However, if you are going to remember three, she should not be one of them.

If you had to remember only three you could easily have an argument debating the merits of any three scientists. I wouldn't say her work is more important than those three, but I would say it's on that level. The book "Six Great Scientists" by J.G Crowther seems to think so too. It's quite unfortunate that Wikipedia has very little on her.

Or maybe J.G. Crowther was also fond of diversity.

BTW the most important woman in the history of science was Emmy Noether. Her theorem is central to Classical Mechanics and very important also in Quantum Field Theory.