SHE measures the heavens . . .

Today is International Women's Day, celebrated with a charming video at google.com and here with lines from Enheduanna (2285-2250 BCE), the earliest woman known to me who was both poet and mathematician.

     The true woman who possesses exceeding wisdom,
     She consults a tablet of lapis lazuli,
     She gives advice to all lands,
     She measures off the heavens, she places the
               measuring cords on the earth.

These lines (found in the preface, translated from Sumerian sources by Ake W Sjoberg and E Bergmann S J) and much more poetry-with-math are found in Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics (AK Peters, 2008) -- a collection edited by Sarah Glaz and me.

The angel of numbers . . .

This poem by Hanns Cibulka (1920 - 2004) -- translated from the German by Ewald Osers -- is collected in the anthology, Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics, edited by Sarah Glaz and me (A K Peters, 2008).

     Mathematics      by Hanns Cibulka     (trans. Ewald Osers)

                  And the angel of numbers
                  is flying
                  from 1 to 2...
                       —Rafael Alberti