╦PARA ├PAR@ ` ╗TEXT ` ¡Fleming, Williamina Paton Stevens1857╨1911astronomerBorn in Dundee, Scotland, on May 15, 1857, Mina (as she was called) Stevens was educated in public schools and from fourteen was a teacher as well as student. In May 1877 she married James O. Fleming, with whom she emigrated to America and settled in Boston the next year. The failure of her marriage in 1879 forced her to seek employment, and she soon became housekeeper for Edward C. Pickering, professor of astronomy and director of the Harvard College Observatory. Before the year was out Pickering had called her to work at the observatory as a temporary employee, and in 1881 she became a permanent member of the staff. From clerical and simple computation work she graduated to more difficult and responsible tasks, eventually taking over the observatory╒s work in the still rudimentary field of stellar classification by photographic spectra. She made numerous improvements in Pickering╒s original scheme of classification and used the ╥Pickering╨Fleming system╙ to produce her Draper Catalogue of Stellar Spectra, covering 10,351 stars, in 1890. Her work provided much of the foundation for the much larger undertaking of Annie J. Cannon. In addition to carrying on her own work with the observatory╒s rapidly growing collection of photographs and supervising a staff of computers, Fleming also edited all of the observatory╒s publications, and in 1898 she was formally appointed curator of astronomical photographs by the Harvard Corporation; she was the first woman to hold a corporation appointment at the university. A major product of her research on stellar spectra was her identification of 222 variable stars. That accomplishment stemmed directly from her discovery of emission lines in the spectra of a number of known red variables, a discovery that provided a highly useful tool in the search for others. Her posthumously published paper on ╥Stars Having Peculiar Spectra╙ listed 28 novae, of which she had discovered 10, and 107 Wolf╨Rayet stars╒ of which she had found 94. Among her many honors she was in 1906 the first American woman elected to membership in the Royal Astronomical Society. She died in Boston on May 21, 1911. ╓styl `
