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 which 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 physics Nobel in 1963.

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

Born in 1906, Amelia Z. Frank grew up a junkyard owner’s daughter in Adrian, Michigan. Local newspaper reports paint her as a bright, accomplished teen and an independent thinker.

As an undergraduate at a leading women’s university, Goucher College, Frank joined the physics club. Her senior yearbook relates that her presentation on the Compton effect – a description of how light interacts with electrically charged particles, named after Arthur Compton – was both highly technical and engaging.

Nine months later,

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