In 1977, an American physicist named John H. Van Vleck won the Nobel Prize for his work on magnetism. In his Nobel lecture, amid a discussion of rare earth elements, one sentence leaps out:

Miss Frank and I made the relevant calculations.

Who was Miss Frank? Van Vleck credits her with key work on the quantum mechanics of magnetism, but she is almost absent from the history books.

Amelia Frank published a handful of scholarly papers that are well-cited for the time. Yet histories of physics mostly mention her only as the wife of Eugene Wigner, who was himself awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1963.

Why don’t we know more about Amelia Frank, and why aren’t her contributions recognized? When we searched through the archives, we found a remarkable scientific life unfolding at the dawn of quantum mechanics.

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