So. On Saturday afternoon I do a post about the dearth of female chartered accountants in 1966. Then in the evening I read, again in The Times (sadly in the Obituary columns) of a woman who qualified as an accountant during WWII
Venetia Phair had several claims to fame, including that, at the age of 9 she suggested the name Pluto for the newly discovered planet which was not, then, a mere dwarf
There are several other lucky coincidences in this story, not least that her suggestion won over others because PL were the initials of Percival Lowell, the founder of the Lowell Observatory where the planetary discovery was made
A pioneer in many ways – one of the generation who were not allowed formally to graduate despite having read maths & physics at Cambridge, a wrong which was finally righted with ceremony in 1998 – Mrs Phair belongs firmly in the category of ‘splendid woman’
And my little coincidence?
Well, a frequentist would look at the occurrence of mentions of Chartered Accountants in The Times etc,etc
In truth, on any other day I probably would not have noticed the fact that Mrs Phair was a qualified accountant
It’s a Bayesian kind of thingy – my prior had changed
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