Growing up in the Bronx in the 1930s, Evelyn Berezin binged on Astounding Science Fiction magazine and developed a precocious interest in physics.

Fortunately, her parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia, knew little or nothing of physics. They didn’t realize “girls weren’t supposed to study it,” she recalled later. While the men of her generation went off to World War II, she studied physics at New York University.

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