Klumpke-Roberts Dorothea

Born on August 9, 1861 in San Francisco, Dorothea Klumpke came to France in 1877 to continue her studies. In 1893, she was the first woman to present a doctoral dissertation  in mathematical sciences at the Faculty of Paris (on the rings of Saturn) and to obtain her PhD. Like her sister, who became a doctor of medicine, she was one of those  foreign students who had paved the way and represented in 1890 71.3 percent of the students enrolled at the Sorbonne.

In 1881, her treatise on comets won a prize of 5,000 francs offered by the Paris Observatory. In 1886, she joined the Observatory, where Admiral Mouchez , to support a major international research program, began to hire young women, a docile and cheap labor, to perform long and tedious calculations. In 1892, she took over as head of the Office of calculations with four calculators, the “ladies of the Map of the Sky.” Her ascension in a balloon to observe the Leonids meteor was big news in 1899. A year later, she participated in an expedition in Norway to observe a total solar eclipse.

In 1901, she married Isaac Roberts, a wealthy Welsh astronomer who had a private observatory in Sussex and specialized in observing nebulae. She returned to France after his death in 1904 and continued to work at the Observatory of Paris. In 1928 she published, as a tribute to her husband, Isaac Roberts’ Atlas of 52 nebulae as well as a supplement in 1932.

A year later, she returned to California, where she was to end her days.