Donna Strickland, an associate professor of physics at the University of Waterloo in Canada, shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics with a French scientist for her work on lasers.
The Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to 210 people. Strickland, whose Wikipedia entry had previously been rejected because she wasn't famous enough, was surprised to learn that out of all those winners, she was only the third woman.
"Is that all, really? I thought there might have been more," she said. "We need to celebrate women physicists, because we're out there."
This year, a female chemist won the Nobel Prize, too. Frances Arnold became the fifth woman since 1901 to get it. The award recognized her work in using directed evolution to produce enzymes for new chemicals and pharmaceuticals.
"All this tremendous beauty and complexity of the biological world all comes about through this one simple, beautiful design algorithm," Arnold said after she won half of the 2018 prize. "What I do is use that algorithm to build new biological things."
The Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to 181 people since 1901.