At its surface, the 2016 film Hidden Figures seems to tell the story of the trials and tribulations of three African American women faced while working at NASA in the early days of the Space Race. But the film is more relevant now as the issue of women in science, in general, is still a matter they have yet to be addressed adequately.

This article is an attempt to put into perspective of how women have shaped science and human civilization throughout history.

In the 19th century much of what we know now about the universe are pretty much wild guesses. Most of these guesses are based on hypothetical mathematics which barely fit into what was observable then.

Such is the life of mathematician and physicist Henri Poincare, who postulated a conjencture that puzzles mathematicians and cosmologists for almost a century.

As the world is beginning to choke itself from all the pollution in the air, one wonders why we are still dilly-dallying on adopting alternative energies. It's not something new, as a matter of fact, solar power - which is now our cheapest source of clean energy - has been around for more than a century.

If there's anyone to blame it's the Victorians...

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, mathematicians working in an area called dynamical systems made use of the ever-advancing computing power to draw computer images of the objects they were working on. What they saw blew their minds: infinitely repeating structures whose beauty and complexity is only rivalled by nature itself.

​At the heart of them lay the Mandelbrot set, which today has achieved fame even outside the field of mathematics.

With the new advancements in gene editing, DNA has became a much talked about subject. Most people get the gist of what it is and its purpose, but how did we come to distill our understanding of life into a single strand of molecule?

​This is the story of how it all came about...