All Mathematicians are Equal!

     Last Saturday's Women's March in Washington was one the great events of my lifetime -- the feeling of community that bonded us participants was palpable.  We chatted and hugged and celebrated our differences and our common ideals. Here is a photo of the sign that I carried and, beneath the sign, are links to poems about women in mathematics who struggled to be considered equal.

This is the sign I carried at the Women's March on January 21, 2017.

This link leads to "Hanging Fire" by Audre Lorde.  This link leads to a few words of mine, "Square Attitudes."  A posting on girls and mathematics includes samples from Sharon Olds and Kyoko Mori and is available here.

The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance

     Audre Lorde (1934-1992)  is one of my favorite poets; links to my previous postings of her work in this blog are given below.  Here is the opening poem from one of Lorde's collections, The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance.

     Smelling the Wind       by Audre Lorde

     Rushing headlong
     into new silence
     your face
     dips on my horizon
     the name
     of a cherished dream  

MatHEmatics / MatSHEmatics

     Last week at the 2015 BRIDGES Math-Arts Conference in Baltimore I gave a short talk on using poetry to celebrate and inspire math girls and women, to recognize achievements and to encourage speaking out -- and also to encourage staying and building community in what often is now a lonely field.  Through a poem we can open doors that help us to talk about difficult issues -- such as isolation or loneliness or misgivings or discrimination. 
     A time-clock at BRIDGES kept me from saying all that I would have wished --  I would like to have quoted the following lines, spoken by a girl and found in "Hanging Fire" by Caribbean-American poet Audre Lorde (1934-1992).

from   Hanging Fire      by Audre Lorde 

          Nobody even stops to think
          about my side of it
          I should have been on the Math Team
          my marks were better than his . . .  

Counting responses

At the Poetry Foundation website, poet Audre Lorde (1934-1992) is described thus:

               A self-styled "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," 

               writer Audre Lorde dedicated both her life 
               and her creative talent to confronting and addressing 
               the injustices of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Here is a counting poem by this fine, bold poet:

Are all mathematicians equal?

My first posting for this blog (on March 23, 2010) featured one of my earliest poems, a tribute to mathematician Emmy Noether (1882 -1935) entitled "My Dance Is Mathematics."  Even as it praised Noether's achievements, the poem protested the secondary status of math-women, not only in Noether's day but also today.  It ends with the stanza :

     Today, history books proclaim that Noether 
     is the greatest mathematician
     her sex has produced. They say she was good
     for a woman.