Poem: "Counting Their Contributions"
This poem came out of the November 6, 2012 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from janetmiles and Dreamwidth user primeideal. It has been sponsored by janetmiles. Read more about Theano, Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Ada Byron, Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya, Lulu Hofmann Bechtolsheim, and Lisa Randall online.
Counting Their Contributions
Theano was the wife of Pythagoras
and the mother of two brilliant daughters.
After the death of her husband,
she carried on the Pythagorean School.
She wrote treatises on mathematics,
physics, medicine, and child psychology.
She worked with the Golden Mean,
where truth and beauty meet.
Her daughter Damo wrote about
the construction of a regular tetrahedron
and the construction of a cube.
Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia
lived in Venice, city of culture and wisdom.
She studied languages and sciences,
philosophy and theology,
mathematics and astronomy,
juggling them all with ease.
She was the first woman in the world
to receive a doctorate degree;
she also earned the Doctor's Ring,
the Teacher's Ermine cape,
and the Poet's Laurel Crown.
She became a mathematics lecturer
at the University of Padua in 1678,
and is quoted even today.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi grew up
tallying her twenty younger siblings
and admiring her merchant father's grasp
of mathematics and economics.
It was differential calculus
that caught her own eye, though,
and she wrote the first
comprehensive text on the topic,
explaining it all very carefully and clearly
for whomever wanted to learn.
Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace
was born as the rope
in her parents' game of tug-of-war.
Her father taught her poetry and passion;
her mother taught her mathematics and science;
and Ada wrapped the rope around her trim waist
and walked away with it,
declaring that she would have both.
She consulted with Babbage
on his calculating engine,
effortlessly speculating
on the composition of music
and the production of graphics.
She suggested to Babbage writing a plan
for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers --
a plan now regarded as the first "computer program."
She saw the future and captured it
both in code and in verse.
Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya
was raised among Russian nobility,
where her uncle's reverent discourses
attracted her to mathematics.
She scaled barriers by her fingernails,
married a figurehead husband,
left her home and moved to Berlin.
There she published three noteworthy papers
on partial differential equations.
In 1889 she became the third woman
to hold a chair at a European University,
and the first mathematician.
Lulu Hofmann Bechtolsheim was born on
May 27 (= 33, as she was fond of pointing out), 1902.
She earned Ph.D. in Mathematics
from the University of Zürich in 1927.
She assisted Edward Kasner who co-authored
Mathematics and the Imagination,
which popularized the terms "googol" (10100)
and "googolplex" (10googol).
She wrote and taught extensively,
always shifting, always searching,
a pioneer who never saw herself as one
because she spent her life looking at horizons
instead of mirrors.
Lisa Randall learned mathematics
and then twisted that into physics,
playing cat's cradle with cosmic strings.
Behind her lay the history of women in textiles;
before her lay the fabric of the universe.
She was the first tenured woman
in the Princeton University physics department
and the first tenured female theoretical physicist
at both MIT and Harvard University.
She wrote two popular science books
... and the libretto of an opera.
They are often overlooked,
these women who study the handwriting of God,
but count up their contributions
and it will be an infinite set.