A slightly belated acknowledgement of a birthday yesterday of Kathleen Lonsdale, who discovered the hexagonal structure of benzene, an image burned into the brain of anyone who has ever studied organic chemistry.
(Twas my misfortune to do so in an agricultural science degree at Sydney Uni – I crammed vast number of chemical structures for the exam and forgot them all five minutes later, but not this one. It was a test of rote learning and nought else.)
But I won’t hold that against Kathleen, for as I learnt from Penny’s always excellent Born on This Date email – a new great woman every day… she was a true pioneer in women’s science.
Wikipedia has a short but solid account and there’s more of the chemistry here.
(Which reminds me I learnt today, from a source I can’t now recall that if you type “info” – without the quotes – after any search in Google it will give you as the first, separated, listing, Wikipedia.
About