Today is Ada Lovelace Day. What’s that? You ask. Here’s a short and sweet answer:

Ada Lovelace Day is about sharing stories of women — whether engineers, scientists, technologists or mathematicians — who have inspired you to become who you are today. The aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields by raising the profile of other women in STEM.

I wanted to construct a mighty post about some of the inspiring women who are doing great science and/or ably communicating about science online. I also wanted to get my homework done before class tomorrow. Nothing I could have written would come close to the epic post that Ed Yong (Not Rocket Science) has written.

“Happy Ada Lovelace Day – a celebration of women science writers”

I’m taking a slightly different tack. I’m sharing the names of women who tell stories – science writers whose work I admire. (If anyone’s wondering, here’s the intensely scientific method I used to compile the list: I sat down, wrote names, and stopped when I got to 15) Each name is accompanied with a brief reason why I think they’re awesome and some links to past work. And as I’ve said before, this is not a list of top female science writers; this is an all-female list of top science writers.

[go read the whole post and check out the writers he’s highlighted.]

Science!