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
18 May 2026

Maybe we overestimated ourselves, I thought, watching the ferries hum against the wine-dark sea. Even if we floated above it, we were still bound to the ocean, engulfed in all its weight and inescapable history. To believe otherwise was a kind of hubris. But we had believed otherwise anyway, and so each of us had become something smaller, less human, suspended in a brittle net of want and memory. And then she appeared. At the wrong time, in the wrong place. My Scylla, my monstress, my deathless siren of anglerfish light. Longing, in that empty, unmoving ocean, for things that had not existed for centuries. How could anyone blame her? The only alternative was to grieve. 
My grandmother slit my father’s bones and let them fly with yeast.
the nightingale was caught in a net / and brought to a lab for further study.
Wednesday: Loss Protocol by Paul McAuley 
Friday: The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-Ran, translated by Gene Png 
Issue 11 May 2026
Issue 4 May 2026
Issue 20 Apr 2026
By: Athar Fikry
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
Issue 13 Apr 2026
Issue 6 Apr 2026
Issue 30 Mar 2026
Issue 23 Mar 2026
Issue 16 Mar 2026
Issue 9 Mar 2026
By: Lio Abendan
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
Strange Horizons
2 Mar 2026
Strange Horizons invites non-fiction submissions for our March 30 special issue on “Fungi in SFF.”
Load More