Celebrate a Science Woman -- and offer friendship!

      Last weekend's Washington Post used the headline 

  Astronomer celebrated as the 'mother' of the Hubble Space Telescope  

for the obituary of Nancy Grace Roman.  It opens with this sentence:

               When Nancy Grace Roman requested permission
               to take a second algebra course in high school,
               the teacher demanded to know, "what lady
               would take mathematics instead of Latin?"

But Roman persisted in the challenging studies and was not dissuaded by biases.  The obituary quotes an interview from Science magazine in which she said:   

                         I am glad I ignored
                         the many people who told me
                         that I could not be  
                         an astronomer.

And my own views about the loneliness of women in STEM fields are indirectly expressed in this square stanza, posted back in 2011.

                                                When  I  look  around
                                                the room  --  if I don't
                                                know in one glance how
                                                many women are
                                                there with me, I smile.