1868-1921
Astronomer

Two Courses.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, on 4 July 1868, one of seven children of a Congregationalist minister and his wife. She studied at Oberlin College in Ohio from 1885 to 1888. She transferred to the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women (later Radcliffe College of Harvard University) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she finished her A.B. degree in 1892. It was in Cambridge, occasioned by two courses, that Leavitt became intrigued by astronomy. Soon after graduation she suffered an illness that left her profoundly deaf.

Cataloguing Variable Stars.

By 1895 Leavitt had received an appointment as a research assistant at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge. By 1902 she was a member of the permanent staff of the observatory and soon thereafter became the head of the observatory's photographic photometry department. As a researcher at Harvard she established a method for ranking star magnitudes...