Top ten girl geeks

Simpson is possibly the world's most famous geek. Admittedly she's fictional, but doesn't that just make her all the more incredibly nerdy? Although Simpson is only 8, she has an IQ of 159, and has been observed to be fluent in Italian, Chinese, Spanish and Swedish. She is an outcast at school on account of her prodigious talents, and often finds it difficult to relate to kids of her age. Simpson's greatest invention is the perpetual motion machine and she is also an expert piano, accordion, bass guitar and baritone saxophone player. In the future, Simpson is expected to become US president.

Shelley shut herself away with a group of writers and intellectuals in a shack near Lake Geneva. Here they embarked on a ghost-story contest, but Shelley failed to find inspiration and went to bed in a huff. That night, however, she dreamt the plot of Frankenstein, the tale of a scientist who brings a monster to life using parts from "the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse". Shelley imagined a science far ahead of her time and her Frankenstein character remains the archetypal geek gone mad.

Franklin was an expert in the structure of DNA and viruses and a keen crystallographer. Her uncle also once attacked Winston Churchill with a dog whip (for unrelated reasons). She went to Cambridge University, but wasn't given a full degree because girls weren't allowed them at the time. Franklin used X-rays to work out the structure of DNA, eventually discovering that helical crystalline DNA (don't ask) did not exist. This meant that she was able to scoff in the faces of other scientists who had mistakenly identified this type of DNA -- and she went so far as to write a comical obituary for the erroneous DNA. Many people believe she was owed a Nobel Prize, but unfortunately she died of cancer before the nominations.