Source: The New Yorker

Brill grew up in a suburb of Winnipeg and attended the University of Manitoba, where she was barred from the engineering program because she was a woman. So she studied mathematics and chemistry instead.

She first landed a job at Douglas Aircraft in California but took time off her career in the 1950s to raise her three children.

Brill contributed to the propulsion systems of spacecraft from the first weather satellite TIROS to the Mars Observer, and she was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2011 by President Barack Obama.

Ms. Brill is believed to have been the only woman in the United States who was actually doing rocket science in the mid-1940s, when she worked on the first designs for a U.S. satellite. Yvonne Brill passed away in Princeton, N.J., Wednesday, March 27) of complications of breast cancer.