From Phillip Gething
Marcus Chown writes that “hardly anyone” knows the name of the Harvard astrophysicist Cecilia Payne nowadays (8 November, p 52). He is no doubt right as far as the general public is concerned, but my recollection from the early 1950s, when I was a working astronomer, is that Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, as she was by then, enjoyed a high professional reputation. She was a leading astrophysicist in the intellectual sense, but perhaps not in the hierarchical sense.
Fleet, Hampshire, UK
