As with Joy, sometimes it takes a successful film with big name stars to make a life-story known. This is the case with Hidden Figures (2016) which focusses on Katherine Johnson (1918-2020) - pictured here in 1962 - and her brilliant female colleagues, or 'computers' as they were called. She was an African-American space scientist and mathematician, a leading figure in American space history, and played a huge role in calculating key trajectories in the Space Race such as the trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, as well as for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the moon.

Jean Purdy's story has strong echoes of that of Rosalind Franklin (1920-58), chemist and crystallographer, who also died early and whose involvement in the elucidation of the structure of DNA was, shockingly, omitted from the history books. During her lifetime, Franklin was not credited for her key role, but years later she has been recognised as providing a pivotal piece of the DNA story

The recently released Joy (2024) tells the story of the early days of IVF which culminated in the birth in 1978 of Louise Joy Brown, the world's first 'test-tube baby'. Dr Patrick Steptoe and Dr Robert Edwards are always cited as the pioneers of IVF, but the film makes clear that there was third person who made an equally important contribution. This was nurse and embryologist Jean Purdy and, scandalously, she was excluded from the official record following her death at the age of 39. So this week on the Post we focus on women whose significant contributions to science and maths have been overlooked.

For her show, Charlie invented May, 'a 700-year-old journeywoman...who walks the landscape, pulling her travelling library on wheels' and is drawn partly from herself and partly from the C14 Margery Kempe, said to be the first woman to write her life story. May's Travelling Library is a 'transformational, nurturing container for knowledge that can be shared'. This amazing installation deserves a longer, open exhibition so that more people can share the creations of Dr Charlie Lee-Potter's artistic skill and imagination; we are hoping that this will happen in our upstairs room in Edgar Buildings next May or June, watch this space. 

Charlie's web of literary and historical references combined with her astonishing making skills made her viva show a superb example of installation art. This piece is a wonderful synthesis of her thinking and creating. 'Walking, walking on alone': Lucy's Carpet is rag-rugged with a complete copy of Charlotte Brontë's Villette hand-printed on recycled milk-bottle fabric, and also contains fragments of Emily and Anne Brontë's works. It evokes the sisters' habit of walking round the Haworth Parsonage table each night as they worked on their novels, a habit Charlotte continued alone after their deaths while finishing Villette.

Now My Skin Will Not Fall Through; Rhoda's Bed by Charlie is made up with paper and milk bed linen, including this beautifully folded quilt. Rhoda in The Waves by Virginia Woolf believes that if she can keep her toes hooked around the end of the bed frame, she will save herself from falling through into nothingness, and this bed "attempts to hold her body in place". As Charlie explains, Virginia Woolf herself was regularly confined to bed and was subjected to the 'rest cure' and force-feeding treatment advocated by Silas Weir Mitchell.

As Dr Charlie Lee-Potter writes of her RCA installation, "milk is the unifying material in the works: laser-etched and used as paper; desiccated and layered as bed linen; and poured into bottles to expose the punitive methods once used to control women by the medical profession". This is A Week's Supply, with 42 pints of milk, the weekly dose force-fed to "clever women judged to be over-stimulated by thinking too much", a treatment devised by Silas Weir Mitchell whose grotesque instructions, described in his 1877 book, are laser-etched on the cabinet's doors.