Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

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The phone call for Elizabeth Rona came to the Budapest university where she worked: Don’t go to the theater, the caller warned.

Rona, who was celebrating her 29th birthday, had planned to meet her family there in a few hours, but she learned that militants had taken control of the building. It was one of many incidents in the upheaval that was tearing at Hungary in the immediate aftermath of World War I and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

It was also typical of the unsettled world that Rona — a woman who was ethnically Jewish in a male-dominated world plagued by anti-Semitism — had to navigate throughout her career as a chemist researching the strange new science of radioactivity.

Rona moved from lab to lab — often from country to country — to seize opportunities for research. As a result of her work, the world would learn fundamental details of the behavior of atoms and how radioactivity could be used as a clock in studying the earth’s history, informing the modern practice of geochronology.