Antonia
Caetana de Paiva Pereira Maury , daughter of a
minister and naturalist, was born in 1866. She received her B.A.
degree from Vassar in 1887 and started work at Harvard in 1888. She
was part of the research team which compiled the Draper Catalogue of
stars.
Maury developed a system for classifying stars that utilized the spectral lines, their widths, and sharpness as a means of classifying stars. Since this was not the system used by Pickering, the director of the star classification project at Harvard, her system remained unused at the time.
Maury's system of star classification was later adopted by Ejnar Hertzsprung and became the basis of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which is the cornerstone of modern stellar astrophysics. In addition to her star classification system, Maury was among the first to discover a double star. She discovered Beta Aurigae in 1889.
Antonia Maury died in 1952 at the age of 86.
References
Kass-Simon, G., & Farnes, P. (1990). Women of Science: Righting the Record. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.