Henrietta Swan Leavitt - Early Years and Education

Early Years and Education

Henrietta Swan Leavitt, the daughter of Congregational church minister George Roswell Leavitt and his wife Henrietta Swan (Kendrick), was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, a descendant of Deacon John Leavitt, an English Puritan tailor, who settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early seventeenth century. (The family name was spelled Levett in early Massachusetts records.) She attended Oberlin College, and graduated from Radcliffe College, then called the Society for the Collegiate Instruction for Women, with a bachelor's degree in 1892. It wasn't until her fourth year of college that Leavitt took a course in astronomy, in which she earned an A–.

Read more about this topic:  Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Famous quotes containing the words early, years and/or education:

    Two sleepy people by dawn’s early light, and two much in love to say goodnight.
    Frank Loesser (1910–1969)

    The years like great black oxen tread the world,
    And God the herdsman treads them on behind,
    And I am broken by their passing feet.
    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

    What education is to the individual man, revelation is to the human race. Education is revelation coming to the individual man, and revelation is education that has come, and is still coming to the human race.
    Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781)