Why is SHE less known? . . .

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.

Sum of moments

Here is a 3x3 square poem -- inspired by a recently-found margin-note I made in Differential and Integral Calculus (by Ross R Middlemiss) when it was my text for an introductory calculus course at Westminster College all those years ago:

          The sum of

          the moments

          is zero.

While the pages of text near the note go on with discussions and diagrams of slices and sums and limits -- they introduce the centroid, the moment of inertia, and the radius of gyration, and are importantly informative -- it is the margin-note that has today delighted me.  I wonder if the girl who wrote it saw it as I do today. I like the mystery.

A poem of calculus (of ants on a worm)

Philip Wexler plays with the terminology of calculus in this poem:

     The Calculus of Ants on a Worm

     Swarming tiny
     bodies nibble
     away, no limits,