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Williamina Patton Fleming Biography

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FLEMING, WILLIAMINA PATTON (STEVENS) (1857-1911). An American astronomer. She was born at Dundee, Scotland, where she taught school from 1871 to 1876. In 1879 she became an assistant at the Harvard College Observatory, where she was appointed curator of astronomical photographs in 1898 and later took charge of the Astrophotographic Building. On plates exposed in 1897 and 1902 she found the spectrum of a meteor, and she is also known as the discoverer of new stars and variables. In 1906 she became an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society, London, and at Wellesley College she was an honorary associate in astronomy. She published A Photographic Study of Variable Stars (1907) and Spectra and Photographic Magnitudes of Stars in Standard Regions (1911).

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. VIII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 681.