The Alphabet of Brilliance: 8 LGBTQ+ Scientists Who Changed History | Pride Month Special
Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850–1891), Mathematician
We start in 19th century Russia, with a woman who wasn’t supposed to exist, at least not in mathematics.
Sofia Kovalevskaya grew up in a Russia where universities were closed to women entirely. Her solution was characteristically audacious: she arranged a marriage of convenience to obtain a passport, moved to Germany, and proceeded to become the first woman in Europe to earn a doctoral degree in mathematics. Her PhD committee included some of the most eminent mathematicians on the continent. They passed her summa cum laude.
Her most important contribution was the Cauchy-Kovalevskaya theorem, a foundational result about the existence of solutions to partial differential equations. These equations are the mathematical language underlying all of physics and engineering. Every wave, every heat transfer, every fluid dynamic that science has ever modeled runs on their logic. Kovalevskaya helped build the room.
She went on to become the first woman to hold a full professorship in mathematics in Europe, at Stockholm University, and the first woman to serve as an editor of a major scientific journal. She also won the prestigious Prix Bordin from the French Academy of Sciences in 1888. She died of influenza at just 41, almost certainly with decades of discovery still ahead of her.
Kovalevskaya maintained a deep and intimate romantic friendship with Swedish playwright Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler, who wrote a biography of her after her death — the kind of bond that 19th century society permitted between women precisely because it refused to name it.
Sources:
Cooke, R. (1984). The Mathematics of Sonya Kovalevskaya. Springer-Verlag.
Koblitz, A. H. (1983). A Convergence of Lives: Sofia Kovalevskaia, Scientist, Writer, Revolutionary. Birkhäuser.
Autostraddle (2013). “Sonya Kovalevsky was a Russian lesbian mathematician.” https://www.autostraddle.com/queer-scientists-the-legend-of-the-unicorn-187054/
MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Kovalevskaya/
Alan Turing (1912–1954), Computer Scientist
If you’ve ever used a computer, a smartphone, or asked an AI a question, you owe a debt to Alan Turing.
Turing was a British mathematician who, during World War II, led the team at Bletchley Park that cracked the German Enigma code. Historians estimate this achievement shortened the war by two years and saved up to 14 million lives. It is one of the most consequential intellectual achievements in human history.
After the war, Turing laid the theoretical groundwork for modern computing and artificial intelligence. He designed the architecture of the stored-program computer, articulated the mathematical theory of computation, and invented the Turing Test, the foundational framework for asking whether a machine can think.
He was also gay, which was a criminal offense in Britain at the time. In 1952, he was prosecuted for “gross indecency” and, rather than prison, accepted chemical castration as punishment. Two years later, he was found dead. The official verdict was suicide. He was 41 years old.
In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II issued a posthumous royal pardon. In 2021, his face was placed on the British £50 note, the highest denomination bill in circulation.
Britain spent decades punishing a man for choosing love beyond the boundaries of social acceptance, and then put him on their money. That tension is worth sitting with.
Sources:
Hodges, A. (1983). Alan Turing: The Enigma. Burnett Books.
Turing, A. M. (1950). “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind, 59(236), 433–460.
The Alan Turing Institute. https://www.turing.ac.uk/about-us/why-alan-turing
Bank of England (2021). Alan Turing £50 note. https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/polymer-50-pound-note
Wellcome Sanger Institute Blog (2022). “LGBTQ+ scientists who shaped history.”
https://sangerinstitute.blog/2022/06/29/lgbtq-scientists-who-shaped-history/
Margaret Mead (1901–1978), Neurobiologist
For decades, the scientific consensus held Margaret Mead may be the most famous social scientist America has ever produced, and she spent her entire career proving that the things societies call “natural” are almost always cultural.
Her 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa challenged the assumption that adolescent turmoil was biologically inevitable, arguing instead that culture, not biology, shapes development. The book became an international bestseller and made Mead a household name. She went on to conduct fieldwork across the Pacific, write more than 20 books, become Curator of Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, teach at Columbia University, and in 1975 be elected President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
She was married three times to men. She also had profound romantic relationships with women throughout her life, most notably with fellow anthropologist Ruth Benedict, whose intellectual partnership shaped both women’s careers deeply, and with Rhoda Métraux, with whom she lived from 1955 until her death. She never publicly named her sexuality, the risks to her career and reputation were too high, but in 1975 she wrote one of the earliest mainstream scientific arguments for sexual fluidity, questioning why society demands that people choose a single orientation for a lifetime.
Her personal life and her science were always in conversation. She studied human love in all its cultural variety, and she lived it the same way.
Sources:
Mead, M. (1928). Coming of Age in Samoa. William Morrow & Company.
Mead, M. (1975). “Bisexuality: A New Awareness.” Redbook Magazine.
Banner, L. W. (2003). Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle. Knopf.
QueerBio.com. “Margaret Mead.” https://queerbio.com/wiki/index.php/Margaret_Mead
Legacy Project Chicago. “Margaret Mead.” https://legacyprojectchicago.org/person/margaret-mead
Ben Barres (1954–2017), Neurobiologist
For decades, the scientific consensus held that glial cells, the non-neuron cells that make up roughly half the brain, were passive support structures. They held neurons in place, fed them nutrients, and otherwise stayed out of the way. Ben Barres proved that was wrong.
His research at Stanford showed that glial cells actively regulate the formation, refinement, and function of synapses. They are not bystanders, they are full participants in how the brain works. This finding fundamentally rewrote neuroscience, with profound implications for the study of neurological disease and brain development.
Barres transitioned in his forties, and the experience gave him an unusually direct window into the gender bias embedded in science. He famously recounted that after his transition, a colleague praised his latest work as being “so much better” than his sister’s, not knowing he and his “sister” were the same person. The story became one of the most cited personal accounts of sexism in academia, and Barres became one of the most outspoken advocates for women and transgender people in STEM that American science has ever seen.
He was the first openly transgender scientist inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.
He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2016 and died the following year. His autobiography, The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist, was published in the final weeks of his life, a last act of advocacy from a man who never stopped fighting for others, even as he was dying.
Sources:
Barres, B. A. (2018). The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist. MIT Press.
Barres, B. A. (2006). “Does gender matter?” Nature, 442, 133–136.
Allen, N. J., & Barres, B. A. (2005). “Signaling between glia and neurons: focus on synaptic plasticity.” Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 15(5), 542–548.
Wellcome Sanger Institute Blog (2022). “LGBTQ+ scientists who shaped history.” https://sangerinstitute.blog/2022/06/29/lgbtq-scientists-who-shaped-history/
National Academy of Sciences. Ben Barres obituary. https://www.nasonline.org
Christopher Strachey (1916–1975) , Computer Scientist
Christopher Strachey is one of computing’s great unsung heroes, and one of its most quietly queer figures.
Born into the intellectual orbit of Bloomsbury London, his uncle Lytton was a founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, alongside Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes, Strachey studied mathematics and physics at King’s College, Cambridge. He struggled academically, and his sister later attributed much of that difficulty to the burden of coming to terms with his own sexuality in an era when that carried criminal risk. He graduated with a modest degree and spent years as a schoolteacher.
And then, in 1951, he taught a computer to play checkers. While still working days at Harrow School, he wrote a program for the Pilot ACE at the National Physical Laboratory that played a complete game of draughts. He also wrote what may be the first computer music program in history, coaxing the Ferranti Mark 1 into playing “Baa Baa Black Sheep.”
His deeper legacy was theoretical. He became one of the founders of denotational semantics, a mathematical framework for defining what computer programs actually mean, and co-developed the Combined Programming Language, a direct ancestor of C. He founded the Programming Research Group at Oxford, which shaped computer science theory for a generation.
He was open about his identity only in his final years. He died in 1975, quietly foundational, and largely forgotten.
Sources:
Campbell-Kelly, M. (1985). “Christopher Strachey, 1916–1975: A Biographical Note.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 7(1), 19–42.
Strachey, C. (1967). “Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages.” Lecture notes, International Summer School in Computer Programming, Copenhagen. Published posthumously in Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation, 13 (2000), 11–49.
Computer History Museum. “Christopher Strachey.” https://history.computer.org/pioneers/strachey.html
Rhizome (2013). “A Queer History of Computing: Part Three.” https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/apr/9/queer-history-computing-part-three/
Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) , Physician & Sexologist
Magnus did more to bring intersex people into the light of science and public life.
Hirschfeld was a German Jewish physician working in Berlin at the turn of the 20th century, and he worked under a deceptively simple motto: through science to justice. In 1897, he founded the world’s first gay rights organization, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, whose primary goal was the repeal of the law criminalizing same-sex relations between men. In 1899, he launched the Yearbook of Intermediate Sexual Types, the first scientific journal ever devoted to sexual and gender variation, including what we now call intersex conditions. He coined the term transvestite and developed the theory of sexual intermediacy, the idea that every human trait exists on a spectrum, and that intersex variations are a natural expression of that spectrum, not a disorder to be corrected.
In 1919, he opened the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. It offered medical care, counseling, gender-affirming procedures, and public sex education, decades before any of those things had widely accepted names.
In May 1933, Nazi stormtroopers raided the Institute and burned its archives in the streets of Berlin. Hirschfeld was abroad and watched the footage in exile. He died two years later in Nice, and never returned home.
Sources:
Hirschfeld, M. (1910). Die Transvestiten. Alfred Pulvermacher.
Wolff, C. (1986). Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology. Quartet Books.
Encyclopædia Britannica. “Magnus Hirschfeld.” https://www.britannica.com/biography/Magnus-Hirschfeld
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Magnus Hirschfeld.” https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/magnus-hirschfeld‑2
Science Museum Blog (2024). “Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Science.” https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/magnus-hirschfeld-and-the-institute-for-sexual-science/
Paul Erdős (1913–1996) , Mathematician
Paul Erdős was, by almost any measure, the most prolific mathematician who ever lived, and one of the most singular human beings science has ever produced.
Born in Budapest to a family of Jewish mathematicians, Erdős published over 1,500 mathematical papers across his lifetime, more than any other mathematician in history. His contributions spanned combinatorics, number theory, graph theory, and probability, fields that underpin everything from cryptography to network science to the mathematical modeling of disease. He was a member of the national science academies of eight different countries.
He also owned essentially nothing. Erdős lived out of a single suitcase, had no permanent home, and spent his career traveling the world, arriving at the doors of fellow mathematicians to work on problems together. His collaboration network was so vast that the scientific community invented a unit of measurement in his honor: the Erdős number, which tracks your degrees of separation from a co-authored paper with Erdős himself. Mathematicians trade their Erdős numbers like baseball cards to this day.
He never married, never dated, and showed no observable interest in romantic or sexual relationships of any kind. He described numbers as his best friends, especially prime numbers, and by all accounts he meant it without irony.
Some historians describe Erdős as asexual. He never used the word himself. He was too busy falling in love with mathematics.
Sources:
Hoffman, P. (1998). The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth. Hyperion.
Schechter, B. (1998). My Brain Is Open: The Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdős. Simon & Schuster.
American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2021). “LGBTQ+ scientists in history.” https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/people/061821/lgbtq-scientists-through-history
The Erdős Number Project, Oakland University. https://oakland.edu/enp
Lozen (c. 1840–1889) , Medicine Woman & Warrior
We close with Lozen, of the Chihenne Chiricahua Apache, a warrior, a strategist, a healer, and a person whose identity and knowledge were both sacred to her community.
Lozen never married, never accepted the roles assigned to Apache women, and rode and fought alongside men throughout the Apache Wars of the 1870s and 1880s. Her brother, Chief Victorio, called her “my right hand, strong as a man, braver than most, and cunning in strategy. Lozen is a shield to her people.” She fought alongside Geronimo. She was captured with Geronimo. She died a prisoner of war in 1889.
But she was also a healer. She studied medicine with elder shamans and developed deep expertise in the medicinal properties of plants and minerals. She used herbs and ceremony to treat wounds and illness in the field, and her community credited her with a spiritual gift for detecting approaching danger, a kind of situational awareness so acute it passed into legend.
One important note: the term Two-Spirit was coined by Indigenous activists in 1990, it would not have been Lozen’s word. But what it names, a distinct, honored, spiritually significant way of being that crossed the boundaries of gender, was understood and celebrated within Apache tradition long before any English term existed for it.
She died forgotten by American history. Her name deserves to be spoken.
Sources:
Ball, E. (1970). In the Days of Victorio: Recollections of a Warm Springs Apache. University of Arizona Press.
Aleshire, P. (1998). Warrior Woman: The Story of Lozen, Apache Warrior and Shaman. St. Martin’s Press.
Multnomah County Library. “Notable Two-Spirit Figures in History.” https://multcolib.org/articles/notable-two-spirit-figures-history
Legends of America. “Lozen: Apache War Woman & Prophet.” https://www.legendsofamerica.com/lozen-apache-war-woman/
New Mexico Historic Women Marker Program. “Little Sister Lozen.” https://www.nmhistoricwomen.org/new-mexico-historic-women/little-sister-lozen/
So here we have eight people and eight identities in the LGBTQ+. Eight ways of being human and eight ways of finding love in a world that today doesn’t want them to exist.
From the equations that underpin all of physics, to the secrets of the human brain, to the healing plants of the Apache homeland, LGBTQ+ people have always been here, doing the work. Advancing knowledge. Healing their communities. Building the tools the rest of us rely on every day. Often in secret. Often at enormous personal cost.
Kovalevskaya. Turing. Mead. Barres. Strachey. Hirschfeld. Erdős. Lozen.
Say their names. Learn their work. And remember that science has always been bigger, and more beautifully varied, than the institutions that tried to contain the insight of those who were just existing as their best self, regardless of social expectations.
Thanks for listening to Math Science History. Until next time, carpe diem!
- Gabrielle