Size / / /

Content warning:



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 po-trigonometricheski)

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.



Jessy Randall's poems and stories have appeared in Asimov's, Nature, Scientific American, and Strange Horizons. Her latest collection is The Path of Most Resistance: Poems on Women in Science (MIT, 2025), a sequel to Mathematics for Ladies (MIT, 2022). She is a librarian at Colorado College and her website is http://bit.ly/JessyRandall.
Current Issue
10 Nov 2025

We deposit the hip shards in the tin can my mother reserves for these incidents. It is a recycled red bean paste can. If you lean in and sniff, you can still smell the red bean paste. There is a larger tomato sauce can for larger bones. That can has been around longer and the tomato sauce smell has washed out. I have considered buying my mother a special bone bag, a medical-grade one lined with regrowth powder to speed up the regeneration process, but I know it would likely sit, unused, in the bottom drawer of her nightstand where she keeps all the gifts she receives and promptly forgets.
A cat prancing across the solar system / re-arranging
I reach out and feel the matte plastic clasp. I unlatch it, push open the lid and sit up, looking around.
By: B. Pladek
Podcast read by: Arden Fitzroy
In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Podcast Editor Michael Ireland presents B Pladek's 'The Spindle of Necessity' read by Arden Fitzroy.
Friday: Esperance by Adam Oyebanji 
Issue 3 Nov 2025
Issue 20 Oct 2025
By: miriam
Issue 13 Oct 2025
By: Diana Dima
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
Issue 6 Oct 2025
Strange Horizons
Issue 29 Sep 2025
Issue 22 Sep 2025
Issue 15 Sep 2025
Issue 8 Sep 2025
By: Malda Marlys
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
Issue 1 Sep 2025
Issue 25 Aug 2025
Load More