THE VERA RUBIN U.S. QUARTER

Vera Cooper Rubin, M.S. '51, a pathbreaking astronomer whose life's work included procuring the scientific evidence to prove the existence of dark matter, is being featured on the 2025 batch of the American Women Quarters Program.

According to Cornell history expert Corey Ryan Earle '07, Rubin is believed to be the first Cornellian ever depicted on a circulating U.S. coin.

Rubin's fellow honorees for 2025 – the program's final year – are athlete Althea Gibson, Girl Scouts founder Juliette Gordon Low, disabilities activist Stacey Park Milbern, and journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells.

The five designs will be circulated throughout the country over the next several months.

And, he said, prior to the launch of the quarters program in 2022, only three women – Susan B. Anthony, Helen Keller and Sacagawea – had ever been featured on circulating (non-commemorative) coins.

The "Standing Liberty" quarter, produced from 1916-30, did depict a female figure, albeit allegorical. As Earle said, it has its own Cornell connection: It was designed by Hermon Atkins MacNeil, who taught industrial arts at Cornell in the 1880s and sculpted the Ezra Cornell statue on the Arts Quad.

The 2025 quarter also means that Rubin "becomes the only astronomer ever featured on a U.S. circulating coin. What an amazing honor," Beeton said.

In 1985, the body of work she presented to the International Astronomical Union fundamentally shifted scientific conceptions of the universe and opened new directions for research in both astronomy and physics.

She went on to win both the U.S. National Medal of Science – awarded by President Bill Clinton in 1993 – and the Gold Medal from the U.K.'s Royal Astronomical Society.

To read the complete article, see:
Rubin, barrier-breaking astronomer, graces a US quarter (https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/03/rubin-barrier-breaking-astronomer-graces-us-quarter)

While other tech companies usually name their products using combinations of inscrutable letters and numbers, most of Nvidia's most recent GPU architectures have been named after famous women scientists.

Nvidia is naming its next critical AI chip platform after Vera Rubin, an American astronomer.

Rubin discovered a lot of what is known about "dark matter," a form of matter that could make up a quarter of the matter of the universe and which doesn't emit light or radiation, and she advocated for women in science throughout her career.

Nvidia has been naming its architectures after scientists since 1998, when its first chips were based on the company's "Fahrenheit" microarchitecture. It's part of the company's culture – Nvidia used to sell an employee-only t-shirt with cartoons of several famous scientists on it.

 

To read the complete article, see:
Nvidia's next chips are named after Vera Rubin, astronomer who discovered dark matter (https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/13/nvidia-to-detail-vera-rubin-chips-at-gtc-conference.html)

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