The Atlantic

One Wikipedia Page Is a Metaphor for the Nobel Prize’s Record With Women

Donna Strickland is only the third woman in history to win the award in physics—and her research probably deserved attention a lot sooner.
Source: Peter Power / Reuters

It was about five in the morning in Ontario, Canada, when Donna Strickland’s phone rang. The Nobel Prize committee was on the line in Stockholm, calling to tell her she had won the prize in physics.

“We wondered if it was a prank,” Strickland said Tuesday, in an interview with a Nobel official after the call. She had been asleep when the call arrived. “But then I knew it was the right day, and it would have been a cruel prank.”

Strickland, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, shares the honor with two other scientists for their work in the 1980s in transforming lasers into tiny tools that today have countless applications. Half of the prize went to Strickland and her collaborator Gérard Mourou, a professor at the École Polytechnique

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