Sometimes matching words to a syllable-count helps to bring focus to my musings. Here are two stanzas for which I used the Fibonacci numbers as lengths for the lines I built as I considered the continuing invisibility of most math-women. (I have some hope that the second of these is primarily remembering -- and is not true of family child-care today.)
8-5-3-2-1-1 A FIB
HE is famous but SHE is not.
Yet we once judged her
potential
greater
than
his.
More FIB-bish 1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21-13-8-5-3-2-1-1
Is
she
less known
because of
motherhood?--few want
to pass on procreation, yet
that choice limits so many things – not for the father,
for he may slip off to an office at children’s bedtimes for extra hours of thinking,
for writing those ideas that never come while bathing
toddlers, or diapering. Bright thoughts
wait in still places
for capture—
or they
float
on.
On the same theme are this post, Counting the Women, and this one, Are All Mathematicians Equal?
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Unfortunately, they are still true.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Margaret, for commenting. If you have direct experiences you'd like to post here, please do.
DeleteAnd you might like to connect to this post about Emmy Noether: http://poetrywithmathematics.blogspot.com/2010/03/poetry-of-logical-ideas.html
JoAnne
The world is a strange place, and outside mathematics no statement is universally true. Here is a picture of me doing mathematics, taken in about 1977:
ReplyDeletehttp://cameroncounts.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/scan0027.jpg
(Apologies for the quality; it is a scan of a faded print taken with an instamatic camera.)
Peter --
DeleteThanks for that photo. A wonderful counterexample that I hope is repeated often.
JoAnne