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
1 Jun 2026

See the bruise on my forehead? That’s wisdom’s kiss.
I am not here to talk about how i got my arm, i am looking for hel p trying to fix it . Apologies for typos the f fingers lag a lot
Kate Macdonald and Duncan Lawie join Dan Hartland to tackle the question of the back catalog.
We bring you Biometric Shell™ Technology, / a sanctuary of seamless containment.
Issue 25 May 2026
By: Louis Inglis Hall
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
Issue 18 May 2026
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
Load More