Madeleine Barnothy Forro

Madeleine Barnothy Forro (Hungarian: Barnóthy Forró Magdolna; August 21, 1904 – February 1995) was a Hungarian-American physicist and astrophysicist. Her work included research on cosmic ray physics, gravitational lensing, and the biophysics of magnetic fields.

Life and career Madeleine Forro was born in the village of Zsámbok, Hungary, on August 21, 1904, to Margit and Robert Forro. She was awarded a doctorate in physics in 1927 from the Royal Hungarian University in Budapest for work measuring dielectric constants. Forro was the first woman to earn a doctorate in physics at the university. Her research in the late 1930s observing cosmic rays, helped to reveal the nature of electrons, pions and muons. They proposed that quasars are amplified images of Seyfert galaxies due to gravitational lensing, which has since been shown to be the case for a small fraction of quasars.

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