Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

Suppose Jesus Christ really was who he said he was. I know not everyone who reads me believes that, but work with me here. If Jesus really was who he said he was, then he could have placed himself on any throne he wanted, anywhere in the world, at any time in history. He could have made himself Caesar. He could have put himself on the throne of Genghis Khan or Ramses II. He could have ruled from Tenochtitlan or Constantinople. He could have placed himself in Buckingham Palace or the White House, the Kremlin or the Forbidden City. But instead, he chose to be a peasant from a conquered people, in a backwater of the Roman Empire. He chose to be a nobody from nowhere. What does that tell us? When I was at Dacor, back in the 90s, I used to think that if I worked my way up the corporate ladder, then I could fix everything when I got to the top. I could put a stop to the ridiculous project schedules and make sure we had proper time and resources to get new products right the firs

I'm really tired of feeling helpless. I don't really make New Year's Resolutions, but there are definitely some changes I need to make. I have so many different writing ideas in my head, but I've never been able to work on more than one at a time. It's one of the main frustrations about having to work a day job, because I feel like I'd be able to write so many more of my ideas with the additional time. A year ago, I told myself that if I couldn't write more than one project at a time, I could at least make notes for future books while working on my current one - but not even that has worked. I kept waiting for it to happen, when what I needed to do was make it happen. So I took this weekend off from my Ada Lovelace biography - now in its final chapter - and did some reading and note-taking. I didn't make all that much tangible progress, but I feel like I learned a lot about how to put stories together, what I'll be capable of while I'm

Writing about Victorian women is hard. You have to fight through all sorts of competing agendas to figure out what really happened in their lives. I first noticed it when I wrote my Florence Nightingale biography a year and a half ago. The previous biographies I read had radically different takes on her life, and especially her relationships with her mother and her sister. One book wanted to make her mother the bad guy, responsible for Florence's misery before she was allowed to go into nursing. Another wanted to make her sister the bad guy, and another wanted both. A number of the books I looked at and discarded wanted to turn Florence into a paragon of caring - but properly submissive - Christian womanly virtue. Florence was actually a Unitarian, and if she'd been submissive, we'd never have heard of her. Then I found the wonderful online archive of Florence's papers, established and maintained at Canada's University of Guelph, and it revealed other thi

One of my favorite examples of "you would never see this on American TV" is the 2009 anime Kemono no Sou-ja Erin , which tells the story of a girl in a Medieval-like fantasy world who learns to communicate with giant wolf/eagle creatures through - *gasp* - science! The novel the series was based on is now available in English as The Beast Player . My oldest niece got a copy for Christmas. There's a passage in the book, after the main character Erin has graduated from "beast doctor" school and become a teacher herself. Her mentor tells her, "The knowledge we teach is simply the truth as we know it at a particular time. What we believe to be true now may be exposed as error through the discoveries of succeeding generations. That's how human knowledge has been renewed throughout the ages. Remind your students of this every chance you get. A good teacher is not one who never doubts, but rather one who strives to keep on learning despite the doub

My 14 year-old niece likes using "OK Boomer." I'm told she even got into an argument with her dad about it. But when I pointed out that - unlike her dad, who is definitely Gen-X - I'm old enough to be considered a Boomer, depending on which social scientist you ask, she replied, "Boomer is a state of mind." Honestly, there have been more than a few times when I've been tempted to say "OK Boomer" myself. I've even brought it up on social media, which earned me quick and vigorous rebukes from some people I'm otherwise on friendly terms with, quick to defend their age group. Folks, my niece is right - "Boomer" is a state of mind, one that can be rejected by people my age and older, and one that can be embraced by people younger than I am. Yesterday, I listened to a fascinating - but depressing - episode of Ezra Klein's podcast, featuring energy and climate writer Dave Roberts, talking about "Republicans vs. the

I usually do my writing warmup by hand. It's something I learned many years ago from the book, The Artist's Way , and not only does it get my creative energies focused, but it's also helped me work through some pretty thorny issues at times. Today I'm trying to get the next-to-last chapter started on my latest mathematical biography, Ada Lovelace: Programming the Future . Proper biographers research their subjects for years before they start writing, but I'd never be able to do a set of six books that way, so I'm researching as I go. It's kind of like hacking out a new trail through the wilderness. I know my destination, and I have an overall idea of how to get there, but I don't know about the unexpected twists and turns, boulders, fallen trees, and other small details along the way. Not until I get there. At the start of each new chapter, I have to scope out the terrain a bit before I can move forward again. In another example of "You