HistoricWomenInMaths

by Jessy Randall

In 2015, I attended a talk on Sarah Frances Whiting given by Colorado College physics professor Barbara Whitten. Whiting was part of a group of women who cataloged stars at Harvard University in the late 19th century. I sat in the audience scribbling notes about these amazing women – I always listen better with a pen in my hand – and got particularly interested when Whitten showed a slide of a murky blob, an example of the star photographs these women used in their work. To my eyes, it looked like nothing much. Really just a smear.

After the talk, I looked up additional information. (Did I mention I’m a librarian?) I learned that one of Whiting’s colleagues, Annie Jump Cannon, cataloged hundreds of thousands of stars and, years later, could still recognize and identify the blurry photos she’d used doing that work. I pictured her being shown a blobby shape and saying “Oh, yes, that’s good old XZ437583, I remember that one.” Or “Hello, PQ2843b!” I started writing poems about Cannon, persona poems written from what I imagined to be her point of view. 

Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941)
(first appeared in Asimov’s)
 
1. Annie Jump Cannon Cataloged Stars
 
Annie Jump Cannon
cataloged stars.
 
The work was tedious.
The pay was terrible.
 
But every day for forty years
she went to work
and held the universe together.
 
2. Annie Jump Cannon Goes Home from the Lab
 
She can’t stop seeing them:
the photographs,
black and white smears of stars.
 
They look like throwaways.
They look like nothing.
But not to her, to her they’re clear
 
as alphabets, because 
she’s good at what she does.

Her name led to others, and I found myself spending my lunch hour in the science section of the Colorado College library stacks. Soon my desk was piled high with thick books about historical women in STEM fields. There were SO MANY MORE women scientists and mathematicians than I ever knew. Than I ever dreamed! I wrote a lot more poems. 

Around this time, some powerful men bragged that with enough fame and power, they could get away with anything, including sexual assault. This made me really mad. So mad that I decided to do something about it! But as a librarian and a poet, what could I do, exactly? Well, I wrote a collection of poems about historical women in STEM fields. Maybe not the most effective form of resistance, but the project staved off my feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. 

I got particularly attached to a set of “biobibliographic source books” edited by Louise S. Grinstein,* and went through them page-by-page looking for women to write about. Frequently, some detail of the lives or work of these women leapt out as a perfect metaphor. When I read the entry on Soviet mathematician Nina Bari, the phrase “mathematics for ladies” led to this poem:

Nina Karlovna Bari (1901-1961)
(first appeared in Strange Horizons)
 
After the revolution, she passed the boys’ exam 
and became the first woman in the Luzitania,
students of Nikolai Luzin known for 
their interest in a new kind of math,
 
descriptive math, something more like 
philosophy, sometimes described as
mathematics for ladies.
 
This particular lady worked on functions
converging “almost everywhere”
(a precise term in trigonemetricheskii)
 
and she herself converged almost everywhere, too:
Paris, France; Lvov, Poland; Bologna, Italy;
even a mountain pass named for her lover, Nemytski,
whom she later married.
 
She married Nemytski, but some say her real love
was Luzin. They say she was despondent at his death,
and that when she was not yet sixty (in other words, 59), 
she threw herself in front of a Moscow Metro train.
 
There’s no way to know. It could have been an accident.
But when a woman had made her name calculating 
functions that converge almost everywhere,
we have to think she knew what she was doing.

In the 1920s in the Soviet Union, “mathematics for ladies” (математика для дам / matematika dlya dam) was a derogatory term for descriptive mathematics such as function theory. As in English, the word for “ladies” in Russian has a different connotation than the word for “women” – ladies (дам / dam) being more fancy and posh, not the Soviet ideal of real-world working women (женщины / zhenshchiny). 

I found this idea pretty hilarious. A special kind of math just for women? Different math for different genders? Aren’t numbers the same for everyone? Numbers and formulas and equations don’t change depending on your gender. But then I remembered those statistics about the gender pay gap – that for every dollar a man makes, women make 84 cents, or 90 cents, or 66 cents, depending whom you ask. 

In Bari’s time, math was supposed to be for practical purposes: engineering, architecture, and so on. “Mathematics for ladies” wasn’t real math – real mathematicians considered it to be useless, more like philosophy than math. Much has changed in the past hundred years. Abstract math, or pure math, is now standard in college and university math programs, and pure math scholars receive as much respect as their comrades in applied math (if, perhaps, not always as much funding).

For more information about the books, links to online poems, and subject indexes, visit http://tinyurl.com/MathforLadies.

Literature

*Women of Mathematics: A Biobibliographic Sourcebook. Ed. Louise S. Grinstein and Paul J. Campbell. New York: Greenwood, 1987.

*Women in Chemistry and Physics: A Biobibliographic Sourcebook. Ed. Louise S. Grinstein, Rose K. Rose, and Miriam H. Rafailovich. New York: Greenwood, 1993.

*Women in the Biological Sciences: A Biobibliographic Sourcebook. Ed. Louise S. Grinstein, Carol A. Biermann, and Rose K. Rose. New York: Greenwood, 1997.

About the author

Published on September 17, 2025.
Photo credit header: Nethery Wylie