50 Underrated Women You Never Learned About In History Class

48. Emmy Noether. Noether’s Theorem is one of the most important and fundamentally beautiful results from the 20th century in math/theoretical physics, and that’s just one of the many impressive things she accomplished. Yet seemingly nobody outside of those who studied those fields in college has heard of her.

49. Bessie Coleman. Saved up money from being a manicurist and chili slinger try to go to aviation school. Was denied for being female and black, and eventually was financially backed to travel to France to earn her aviator’s license, which she did in 1921. She came back to the US as the first woman of black and Native American descent to earn an aviation license and the first person of black and NA descent to earn an international aviation license.

To make a living as a civilian aviator, she became a barnstormer and exhibition aviator. She died five years later when the plane she was flying went into a spin and she was thrown out at 2000 ft.

50. Irena Sendler (1910-2008). She saved 2,500 children during the Holocaust from the Warsaw ghetto. Even when she was arrested and tortured, she wouldn’t reveal the identities of those children or the people she was working with. Later, after her escape, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.