Mária Telkes was preceded by scientists of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries: Katherine Boyle, Lady Ranelagh (1615–1691) in England; the chemist Marie Anne Paulze (1758–1836), known as Mme. Lavoisier, in France; the Italian Lucia Galeazzi Galvani (1743–1788); and the Russian Julia Lermontova (1847–1919), a pioneer of the periodic table. She was also part of the lineage of scientists originating with Marie Sklodowska-Curie (1867–1934), co-discoverer of radioactivity, Polonium, and Radium, who received two Nobel Prizes: Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911.
Mária Telkes collaborated with architect Eleanor Raymond (1887–1989) in designing and constructing the Dover Sun House, which was funded by sculptor Amalia Peabody. Some of her contemporaries included the French scientist Irène Joliot-Curie (1897–1956), who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 with her husband for discovering induced radioactivity and artificial radioactivity, and Marguerite Perey (1909–1975), assistant and close collaborator of Marie Curie, who discovered Francium while purifying lanthanum samples containing actinium. Another notable figure was Samira Musa (1917–1952), an Egyptian scientist who worked to make the medical use of nuclear technology affordable for all; Ida Noddack (1896–1978), a German chemical engineer, co-discovered Rhenium in 1925 and was the first to propose the concept of nuclear fission; Lise Meitner (1878–1968), an Austrian physicist, co-discovered Protactinium and nuclear fission; Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1906–1972), a German physicist, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 for the nuclear shell model; Chien-Shiung Wu (1912–1997), a Chinese-born American physicist, experimentally confirmed the hypothesis of parity violation in weak nuclear interactions; Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958), a British chemist and crystallographer, played a crucial role in understanding the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite; Hertha Ayrton (1854–1923), an English engineer, mathematician, and physicist, was a close friend of Marie Curie; Marietta Blau (1894–1970) was a nuclear chemist. Mathematicians Emmy Noether (1882–1935) and Hilda Geiringer (1893–1973) made significant contributions to their field, as did Edith Clarke (1883–1959), an electrical engineer and author of Circuit Analysis of A-C Power Systems, a foundational textbook in energy engineering.
Among contemporary scientists, we find the Egyptian researcher Shaimaa Omran, who aims to develop a strategy for evaluating photovoltaic solar penetration in distribution networks using, among other tools, evolutionary artificial intelligence algorithms. She works on advancing the application of renewable energies, the very idea that inspired Mária Telkes.