Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science

Poems about historical women in STEM fields.

You know you want to read about Mary Anning’s seashells by the seashore, Elizabeth Blackwell losing her eye, Bertha Pallan’s side hustle in the circus, Honor Fell bringing a ferret to her sister’s wedding, Annie Jump Cannon cataloguing stars, Mary G. Ross stumping the panellists on What’s My Line, Alice Ball’s cure for leprosy, and Roberta Eike stowing away on a research vessel. Some of these women triumphed spectacularly. Others barely survived.

Carefully researched, emotional, and witty, these poems about historical women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine will make you laugh out loud and break your heart in just a few lines. Mathematics for Ladies offers a wickedly funny and feminist take on the lives and work of women who resisted their parents, their governments, the rules and conventions of their times, and sometimes situations as simple and infuriating as a lack of a women’s bathroom in a science building on a college campus.

There will be women here you’ve heard of (Marie Curie, Jane Goodall, milie du Ch telet) and women you probably don’t know (Virginia Apgar, Maryam Mirzakhani, Ynes Mexia, Susan La Flesche Picotte, Chien-Shiung Wu). If you’ve seen Randall’s poems in Scientific American, Analog, or Asimov’s Science Fiction, you know she has a knack for drawing the reader in with extraordinary moments in, and lyrical understanding of, the lives of these women.

Illustrated with Kristin DiVona’s portraits for NASA’s Reaching Across the Stars project, this is a book to share with scientists, feminists, and poets, young and old and of any gender.