Laura Maria Caterina Bassi (29 October 1711 – 20 February 1778) was an Italian physicist and academic. Recognised and depicted as "Minerva" (goddess of wisdom), she was the second woman in the world to earn the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (after the philosopher Elena Cornaro Piscopia, who had received a doctorate in 1678) and the first woman to have a doctorate in science. Working at the University of Bologna, she was also the first salaried woman teacher in a university. In fact, at one time she was the highest paid employee. She eventually became the first female university professor in the world. She was also the first woman member of any scientific establishment, when she was elected to the Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna in 1732.
Bassi had no formal education and was privately tutored from age five till she was twenty. By then she was well versed in all major disciplines including sciences and mathematics. Noticing her ability, Prospero Lambertini, the Archbishop of Bologna (later Pope Benedict XIV) became her patron. With Lambertini's arrangement she publicly defended forty-nine theses before professors of the University of Bologna on 17 April 1732, for which she was awarded a doctoral degree on 12 May. A month later, she was appointed by the university as its first woman teacher, albeit with restriction to teach all-male classes. Lambertini, by then the Pope, helped her to receive permission for private classes and experiments, which were granted by the university in 1740.
Bassi became the most important populariser of Newtonian mechanics in Italy. She was inducted by the Pope to the Benedettini (similar to modern Pontifical Academy of Sciences) as an additional member in 1745. She took up the Chair of Experimental Physics in 1776, the position she held until her death. She is interred at the Church of Corpus Domini, Bologna.
