One can hardly do justice to Marie Tharp in a paper of this length, as her life exemplifies so many strands of emerging science and disciplines as well as a sea-change in society as a whole. Her story points to the great value of the study of the history of disciplines, in the broad sense of geology as a whole, the emerging subsciences of geophysics and more sophisticated seismology, and as the newly coined oceanography. In a relatively short period, knowledge of the ocean floor went from an assumed almost featureless abyssal plain to a worldwide complex of ridges, valleys and transform faults showing regularly reversing strips of magnetism. Accounts of Marie Tharp’s life also show a progression. She was at first nearly invisible, a “computer” as then known as she took numbers and translated them to maps. She was not allowed to go on ships to collect data, was basically ignored in published papers and was rarely referenced in histories, but her career ended with a full and fair assessment of her place in the complex story.