Clarifications on the Chien-Shiung Wu feature

The article “Chien-Shiung Wu’s trailblazing experiments in particle physics ” (Physics Today, December 2024, page 28) says Elena Aprile “was the second woman to join the [Columbia University physics] department, more than four decades after Wu.” Many former Columbia physics students, however, know this to be untrue, having taken the class we affectionately called “Lucy Lab,” designed and supervised by Lucy J. Hayner. Her Physics Today obituary (January 1972, page 97 ) describes Hayner as “a professor emeritus of physics at Columbia University.” It says she received a master’s degree at Columbia in 1920 and that “after returning to Columbia in 1929, she taught in and later headed the Ernest Kempton Adams Laboratory.” As a Columbia undergraduate in the early 1960s, I took Hayner’s lab class and Wu’s course in nuclear physics. Thus, I experienced the teaching of two women on the Columbia physics faculty at a time when Aprile—who was born in 1954—was not even 10 years old.