Awards and Honors
- The asteroid 5383 Leavitt and the crater Leavitt on the Moon are named in her honor.
- Unaware of her death four years prior, the Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler considered nominating her for the 1926 Nobel Prize in Physics, and wrote to Shapley requesting more information on her work on Cepheid variables, offering to send her his monograph on Sofia Kovalevskaya. Shapley replied, let Mittag-Leffler know that Leavitt had died, and suggested that the true credit belonged to his (Shapley's) interpretation of her findings. She was never nominated, because the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.
Read more about this topic: Henrietta Swan Leavitt
Famous quotes containing the word honors:
“Justice shines in very smoky homes, and honors the righteous; but the gold-spangled mansions where the hands are unclean she leaves with eyes averted.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)