Image copyright Uni Waterloo Image caption Dr Strickland shared the prize for discoveries in laser physics 
 
 The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to a woman for the first time in 55 years. 
 
 Donna Strickland, from Canada, is only the third woman winner of the award, along with Marie Curie, who won in 1903, and Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who was awarded the prize in 1963. 
 
 Dr Strickland shares this year's prize with Arthur Ashkin, from the US, and Gerard Mourou, from France. 
 
 It recognises their discoveries in the field of laser physics. 
 
 Dr Ashkin developed a laser technique described as optical tweezers, which is used to study biological systems. 
 
 Drs Mourou and Strickland paved the way for the shortest and most intense laser pulses ever created. They developed a technique called Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA). It has found uses in laser therapy targeting cancer and in the millions of corrective laser eye surgeries which are performed each year. 
 
 Speaking to the BBC, Dr Strickland said it was "surprising" it had been such a long time since a woman had won the award. 
 
 However, she stressed that she had "always been treated as an equal", and that "two men also won it with me, and they deserve this prize as much if not more than me". 
 
 Image copyright Reuters Image caption Arthur Ashkin and Gerard Mourou were honoured for their contributions to the field 
 
 The award comes a few days after a physicist gave a "highly offensive" lecture at the Cern particle physics laboratory in Geneva in which he said that physics had been "built by men" and that male scientists were being discriminated against. 
 
 He has since been suspended by the research centre. 
 
 Dr Strickland called the physicist's remarks "silly" and said she never took such comments "personally". 
 
 The last woman to win the physics prize, German-born American physicist Maria Goeppert-Mayer, took the award for her discoveries about the nuclei of atoms. 
 
 Polish-born physicist Marie Curie shared the 1903 award with her husband Pierre Curie and Antoine Henri Becquerel for their research into radioactivity. 
 
 The award is worth a total of nine million Swedish kronor (£770,686; $998,618). 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre Curie 
 
 Reacting to her win, Dr Strickland, who is based at the University of Waterloo in Canada, said: "First of all you have to think it's crazy, so that was my first thought. And you do always wonder if it's real. 
 
 "As far as sharing it with Gerard, of course he was my supervisor and mentor and he has taken CPA to great heights so he definitely deserves this award. And I'm so happy Art Ashkin also won." 
 
 She added: "I think that he made so many discoveries early on that other people have done great things with that it's fantastic that he is finally recognised." 
 
 In a statement, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) offered its congratulations to all the winners, adding: "The countless applications made possible by their work, like laser eye surgery, high-power pettawat lasers, and the ability to trap and study individual viruses and bacteria, only promise to increase going forward. 
 
 "It is also a personal delight to see Dr Strickland break the 55-year hiatus since a woman has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, making this year's award all the more historic." 
 
 Image copyright SPL Image caption Mourou and Strickland's technique has found several applications, including in laser eye surgery 
 
 What is the work that has won a Nobel? 
 
 Before Dr Strickland and Dr Mourou's pioneering work, the peak power of laser pulses was limited because, when cranked up to high intensities, they would destroy the material used for amplifying its energy. 
 
 To get round this, the researchers first stretched the laser pulses in time to reduce their peak power, then amplified them and finally compressed them. 
 
 When a laser pulse is compressed in time and becomes shorter, more light is packed into a small space. This dramatically increases the intensity of the pulse. 
 
 Dr Strickland and Dr Mourou's technique, called chirped pulse amplification (CPA), became standard for high intensity lasers. 
 
 Arthur Ashkin realised an old dream in science fiction - using the radiation pressure of light to move physical objects. In doing so, he invented the optical tweezers that are today used to grab particles, atoms, viruses and living cells with their laser-based pincers. 
 
 He first worked on getting laser light to push small particles towards the centre of the beam and hold them there. 
 
 Then, in 1987, he used the tweezers to capture living bacteria without harming them. The technique is now used widely to study the machinery of life. 
 
 Follow Paul on Twitter. 
 
 Previous winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics 
 
 Image copyright S.Ossokine/A.Buonanno (MPI Gravitational Physics) Image caption A computer simulation of gravitational waves radiating from two merging black holes 
 
 2017 - Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish earned the award for the detection of gravitational waves. 
 
 2016 - David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz shared the award for their work on rare phases of matter. 
 
 2015 - Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald were awarded the prize the discovery that neutrinos switch between different "flavours". 
 
 2014 - Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura won the physics Nobel for developing the first blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs). 
 
 2013 - Francois Englert and Peter Higgs shared the spoils for formulating the theory of the Higgs boson particle. 
 
 2012 - Serge Haroche and David J Wineland were awarded the prize for their work with light and matter. ||||| FILE- In this April 17, 2015, file photo a national library employee shows the gold Nobel Prize medal awarded to the late novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in Bogota, Colombia. This year’s round of Nobel... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE- In this April 17, 2015, file photo a national library employee shows the gold Nobel Prize medal awarded to the late novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in Bogota, Colombia. This year’s round of Nobel Prizes begins Monday, Oct. 1, 2018, with the award for medicine or physiology, honoring research... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE- In this April 17, 2015, file photo a national library employee shows the gold Nobel Prize medal awarded to the late novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in Bogota, Colombia. This year’s round of Nobel Prizes begins Monday, Oct. 1, 2018, with the award for medicine or physiology, honoring research... (Associated Press) FILE- In this April 17, 2015, file photo a national library employee shows the gold Nobel Prize medal awarded to the late novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in Bogota, Colombia. This year’s round of Nobel... (Associated Press) 
 
 STOCKHOLM (AP) — The Latest on the awarding of the Nobel Prizes (all times local): 
 
 11:45 a.m. 
 
 Three scientists from the United States, France and Canada have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for advances in laser physics. 
 
 The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences on Tuesday awarded half the 9-million-kronor ($1.01 million) prize to Arthur Ashkin of the United States and the other half will be shared by Gerard Mourou of France and Canada's Donna Strickland. 
 
 The academy says Ashkin developed "optical tweezers" that can grab tiny particles such as viruses without damaging them. 
 
 Strickland and Mourou helped develop short and intense laser pulses that have broad industrial and medical applications. 
 
 ___ 
 
 7:15 a.m. 
 
 The Nobel Prize for physics honors researchers for discoveries in phenomena as enormous as The Big Bang and as tiny as single particles of light. 
 
 This year's award will be announced Tuesday. 
 
 The 9-million-kronor ($1.01 million) prize, which can be shared by as many as three people, is decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. 
 
 Last year's physics prize went to three Americans who used abstruse theory and ingenious equipment design to detect the faint ripples in the universe called gravitational waves. 
 
 On Monday, American James Allison and Japan's Tasuku Honjo won the Nobel medicine prize for groundbreaking work in fighting cancer with the body's own immune system. 
 
 The Nobel chemistry prize comes Wednesday, followed by the peace prize on Friday. The economics prize, which is not technically a Nobel, will be announced Oct. 8. ||||| On Tuesday at 6:14 am, Wikipedia contributors created the very first entry for Donna Strickland, the University of Waterloo laser physicist who, just minutes earlier, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. With that announcement, she became just the third woman in history to have won the physics award. It honors work that appeared in her very first published scientific paper, from 1985 — the academic version of a hole-in-one. 
 
 Strickland and Gérard Mourou were awarded half the $1 million prize for their discovery of a novel way to amplify the power of laser beams in short bursts. This technology, for instance, is used in laser eye surgery. It’s a major contribution to science that helped move laser technology from its infancy to its myriad applications (cutting, drilling, manufacturing, data storage, surgical work, you name it) today. Mourou and Strickland were co-authors on the work. Though Mourou was Strickland’s PhD advisor at the time, they are co-credited with the discovery. 
 
 Mourou has had a Wikipedia page since at least 2005. But there was no entry on Strickland’s accomplishments until today. 
 
 A Twitter user pointed out to me that articles on Strickland had been drafted on the online encyclopedia before in May 2018 — but the draft was rejected by moderators. “This submission’s references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article,” the moderators wrote, despite the fact that the original author linked to a page that showed Strickland was once president of the Optical Society, a major physics professional organization and publisher of some of the field’s top journals. 
 
 You may think: what’s the big deal? 
 
 Why does it matter that an obscure laser physicist didn’t have a Wikipedia entry until she won science’s greatest prize? 
 
 It matters because women’s visibility in science matters. It matters because far too many women aren’t encouraged to, or don’t feel welcome to, pursue careers in science. 
 
 One thing that would help is a better understanding that women have made important, inspiring contributions to science. “When you think about what a scientist means, you probably think of an Einstein figure — a man in a lab or at a chalkboard with fuzzy, unkempt hair,” my colleague Julia Belluz has written. “When you think of a scientist’s voice, you might conjure Neil deGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan. With these voices and images so pervasive in our culture, it’s easier to associate �?scientist’ with �?man’ — and in particular, �?white man.’” 
 
 Women scientists like Vera Rubin, Nettie Stevens, Henrietta Leavitt, Rosalind Franklin, and so many others ought to be just as famous. 
 
 And Wikipedia, for all its faults, is the most prominent place where current human history is being told, searched for, and shared. That’s why the new Strickland Wikipedia entry is still important — if belated. A Nobel Prize winner ought to be visible to the young girls and aspiring scientists who may be Googling her name today. 
 
 Women still face a lot of discrimination in science 
 
 Historically, science and engineering has been a white men’s club. And it shows in the workforce to this day. 
 
 In January, the Pew Research Center published a report that found 50 percent of women working in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) have experienced gender discrimination on the job, and 36 percent say sexual harassment is a problem in their workplace. 
 
 Women represent only 30 percent of the STEM workforce, and see a significant pay gap compared with men’s salaries. Women are often underrepresented at the top levels of academic hierarchies. And problems with discrimination appear to be worse when women work in male-dominated offices, according to Pew. 
 
 There are so many ways women scientists — and minority scientists — have been erased from history or not written into it. It’s often hard to find photographs of historic female scientists (particularly nonwhite female scientists), and many more Wikipedia pages of women scientists still need to be written. 
 
 “It’s pretty easy to find inspiring stories and role models who look like you, whose lives mirror parts of your own, if you’re a white man,” Hilda Bastian, a scientist who has worked to raise the visibility of women scientists online, told Belluz. “But it’s hard to find people you identify with if you’re not.” 
 
 Of course, there’s also a long history of men taking credit for women’s accomplishments. And the Nobel Committee has skipped plenty of opportunities to award important discoveries made by women scientists. 
 
 Sexism lingers in science. Just this week, a CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) scientist made headlines when he declared that “physics was invented and built by men, it’s not by invitation” at a scientific conference. 
 
 Strickland expressed surprise this morning when a journalist reminded her that she is just the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics. “Is that all, really?” she said. 
 
 More women need to be recognized for their contributions to science, both by the Nobel Committee and in the pages of Wikipedia. ||||| Today, optical physicist Donna Strickland received the Nobel Prize for her work on ultrashort lasers. 
 
 When her name was announced, a search for Strickland’s name on Wikipedia would have turned up nothing. As recently as May, Wikipedia editors weren’t convinced that Strickland’s work was significantly covered enough to merit an article on the site. 
 
 Strickland is an associate professor of physics at the University of Waterloo in Canada—a title that, as many observers have noticed, does not seem to reflect the significance of her work. 
 
 Strickland and colleague Gérard Mourou shared half of the 2018 prize, which was also awarded to scientist Arthur Ashkin. Strickland is now currently the only living female Nobel laureate in physics, joining Marie Curie and the theoretical physicist Maria Goeppert-Mayer as the only women of the award’s 209 recipients. 
 
 Prior to winning the Nobel Prize, Strickland’s only previous mention on Wikipedia was in an article about Mourou, her male co-inventor. On May 23, a Wikipedia editor rejected a draft of an article about Strickland, claiming that it failed to “show significant coverage (not just passing mentions) about the subject.” The rejected draft noted that she was at that time the associate chair of the physics department at Waterloo, and a past president of the Optical Society. 
 
 A revised draft including her Nobel win went live about 90 minutes after the prize was announced. Only 17% of the current biographical entries on Wikipedia are about women, and the site is particularly thin on women in science.
– Three scientists from the United States, France, and Canada have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for advances in laser physics, including the first woman to take home the prize in 55 years. The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences on Tuesday awarded half the $1.01 million prize to Arthur Ashkin of the United States, and the other half will be shared by Gerard Mourou of France and Donna Strickland of Canada, per the AP. Strickland is the third female laureate in physics, but the first in more than half a century, reports the BBC. The academy says Ashkin developed "optical tweezers" that can grab tiny particles such as viruses without damaging them. As the Guardian notes, "this means scientists can hold even living cells in place, allowing them to probe their inner workings." Strickland and Mourou helped develop short and intense laser pulses that have broad industrial and medical applications. The Nobel panel's explanation: "Ultra-sharp laser beams make it possible to cut or drill holes in various materials extremely precisely—even in living matter. Millions of eye operations are performed every year with the sharpest of laser beams." (A CERN scientist just got suspended for saying physics was built by men.)