WRITING:  Wertheim is the author of a trilogy of books about the cultural history of physics: Pythagoras Trousers, charting the 2000-year-long intersection between physics and religion; The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, a groundbreaking exploration of Western concepts of space from Dante to the Internet; and Physics on the Fringe, a sociological study of “outsider science,” a term she coined. These have been translated into a dozen languages including German, Italian, and Korean. Her other books include A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space, a poetic introduction to non-Euclidean geometry; and Value and Transformation of Corals, a publication about her acclaimed Crochet Coral Reef project that accompanied a major retrospective exhibition of the project in Germany. She blogs on Substack under the title Science Goddess, where the first post – Who Is Science Writing For? – articulates her philosophy of science communication: to both share its ‘conceptual enchantments’ and to critique its social, political, and cultural embeddings.

Margaret has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Guardian, TLS, WSJ, Washington Post, New Scientist, The Sciences, Cosmos, Aeon plus many others, and was a long-standing contributing editor at Cabinet. From 2000-2005, she wrote the “Quark Soup” science column for the LA Weekly, sister paper to the Village Voice. Her work has been included in Best American Science Writing 2003 (edited by Oliver Sacks), Best Australian Science Writing (2014, 2016, 2018) and Best Writing on Mathematics 2018 (Princeton University Press). She has been a visiting journalist to Antarctica, from which she wrote a series of articles about women scientists "on the ice", and from Venezuela, where she penned a cover story for the Los Angeles Times Magazine about the making of Werner Herzog's Amazon jungle film "The White Diamond," following an engineer's efforts to build a miniature airship. 

Margaret also writes essays about the intersection of art & science. Her work has appeared in exhibition catalogs for the Walker Arts Center's show The Quick and the Dead, the Hayward Gallery's A User's Guide to the Universe, and the Venice Biennale's Encyclopedic Palace. In addition to science, she maintains an active interest in mathematics and has done an extended series of interviews with mathematicians for Cabinet. Her articles on math have appeared in Aeon and the New York Times.