John H. Van Vleck, who grew up in Madison and attended and taught physics at the University of Wisconsin, won the Nobel Prize in 1977 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.