Atkins profiles seven women whose groundbreaking work drew on their love of and aptitude for math: Caroline Herschel (1750-1848; discovered comets, mapped stars); Florence Nightingale (1820-1910; used math to create charts showing how sanitary practices impacted outcomes for patients during Crimean war, changing medicine); Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854-1923; math major at Girton, one of first British colleges for women; electrical engineer and inventor); Marie Tharp (1920-2006; mapped the ocean floor); Katherine Johnson (1918-2020; NASA "computer"/mathematician who did critical work on Apollo and other programs); Edna Lee Paisano (1948-2014; statistician with U.S. census bureau who used her understanding of Native peoples as a member of the Nez Perce nation to change bureau practices in order to encourage Native people's participation in the census); and Vera Rubin (1928-2016; astronomer who discovered evidence for existence of dark matter in the universe). The individual poems are wonderfully crafted; collectively they give sense of each women's life and work while also making thematic connections to one another, and other groundbreaking women. Johnson is African American, Paisano Nez Perce, the others are white (Rubin Jewish). A fine companion to her previous volume Finding Wonders, about women in science, this inspired work concludes with notes and a brief description of her research into each woman. (Age 10 and older)

Learn about seven groundbreaking women in math and science in this gorgeously written biographical novel-in-verse, a companion to the “original and memorable” (Booklist, starred review) Finding Wonders: Three Girls Who Changed Science.

After a childhood spent looking up at the stars, Caroline Herschel was the first woman to discover a comet and to earn a salary for scientific research. Florence Nightingale was a trailblazing nurse whose work reformed hospitals and one of the founders of the field of medical statistics. The first female electrical engineer, Hertha Marks Ayrton registered twenty-six patents for her inventions.

Marie Tharp helped create the first map of the entire ocean floor, which helped scientists understand our subaquatic world and suggested how the continents shifted. A mathematical prodigy, Katherine Johnson calculated trajectories and launch windows for many NASA projects including the Apollo 11 mission. Edna Lee Paisano, a citizen of the Nez Perce Nation, was the first Native American to work full time for the Census Bureau, overseeing a large increase in American Indian and Alaskan Native representation. And Vera Rubin studied more than two hundred galaxies and found the first strong evidence for dark matter.

Told in vibrant, evocative poems, this stunning novel celebrates seven remarkable women who used math as their key to explore the mysteries of the universe and grew up to do innovative work that changed the world.