Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, daughter of a Viennese Jewish haute-bourgeois family, fled Austria in 1937 and went on to have a successful career as Hedy Lamarr, one of Hollywood’s most seductive screen icons. Mathematically talented, she turned her attention to science in the war years, developing the U.S. Patent number 2,292,387 (1942) on a secret communication system using frequency hopping to keep radio-guided torpedoes undetectable. The idea, first used by the U.S. Navy, served as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communications technology, such as that currently applied in Wi-Fi network connections.