A Picture is worth 1000 words . . .

     Tomorrow, March 1, we begin Women's History Month.  Join in celebration of math people with the Mathematician Poster Project  -- a poster series featuring modern mathematical role models, created by a group of math graduate students and alumni. All files are freely downloadable below, for sharing either online or in print.  The project is new and growing -- in the first six available posters, math-women featured therein include Pamela Harris, Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017), and Julia Robinson (1919-1985).

     Each of the posters contains a few words of wisdom that are, in their way, poetic. Here are words from Pamela Harris:          Mathematical
                                                                    discovery brings me
                                                                    great joy, yet I am
                                                                    far more than the
                                                                    theorems I prove.  

These two links -- Mirzakhani and Robinson -- lead to other postings in this blog that have included these math-women.

A Lemma by Constance Reid

Constance Reid (1918-2010), died on October 14.  Sister of a mathematician (Julia Robinson), Reid wrote first about life in World War II factories that supported the war effort and then, later, several biographies (including one of her sister) and other books about mathematics.  Kenneth Rexroth's poem "A Lemma by Constance Reid" (offered below) is based on material appearing in Reid's popular book From Zero to Infinity:  What Makes Numbers Interesting (Thomas Y Crowell, 1955).  Reid is known for the enthusiasm and clarity with which she presented mathematical ideas--seeking to attract and to satisfy non-mathematical readers. 

Counting the women

     The stimulus for this posting appeared a few weeks ago in the Washington Post -- in an article that considers the loneliness of women in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, math). 
     For me, it was never a conscious thing -- the counting.  It simply happened.  The numbers are small and you know, if you are a woman and a mathematician in a room full of mathematicians, how many women are in the room.  Any room.  It is a small counting number.  Sometimes it is 1. 

Musical sounds of math words -- in a CENTO

  A cento is a literary work formed by assembling 

words or phrases from other writers.  

As a math-person, I love to hear the melodic rhythm of certain multi-syllabic mathematical terms.  And so I have looked at a list of dissertation-titles of twentieth century female mathematicians -- and I have chosen words from these titles that sounded lovely to me.  Here is my cento poem; read it ALOUD and enjoy the sounds.

"Celebrating Dissertations"     

 The math-women whose titles have been sampled here are: