Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

The Christmas mayhem kept me from finishing my promotional essay for the Mathematical Nights series, but today I finally got it done. See what you think of it. Mathematicians Are People, Too! One was the only legitimate child of a notorious poet, taught the rigors of math so she wouldn't follow in her father's footsteps. One was a career government official, who only studied math as his hobby. And one became a celebrity by carrying a lamp around an overcrowded army hospital in modern-day Turkey. Mathematicians have long had a bad reputation in popular culture. When Arthur Conan Doyle needed an archenemy for Sherlock Holmes, he created Mathematics Professor James Moriarty. When The Simpsons wanted to parody a NASA space shuttle crew, they chose to make the group "a mathematician, a different kind of mathematician, and a statistician." But is all that bad press really deserved? The producers of Hidden Figures didn't think so, and things turned out al...

I don't always do an end-of-year "Best Of" list or anything like that. In fact, some time ago I gave up calling it a "Best Of" list, because how would I really know what the best of anything is? This year, however, I've got the New York Times helping me out, by including my personal favorite anime series of the year among their Best TV Shows of 2018 . You wouldn't expect any anime to make the New York Times list (unless it had Hayao Miyazaki's name attached to it, anyway), but A Place Further Than the Universe pulled it off. This 13-episode series about four high school girls who join an expedition to Antarctica works on so many levels - characters, plotting, details, and themes. It's also one of the few shows that's ever affected the course of my real-world life. That doesn't happen often, but I'm a writer, so it does happen from time to time. In this case, when I heard about the habitat restoration project on San Nico...

My email brought me big news from Royal Fireworks Press today. My Florence Nightingale biography, The Lady With the Diagrams , is coming out much sooner than I expected. MUCH sooner. End-of-next-month sooner. There had been some rumblings about it a few days ago, when the publicist said they wanted to market it together with The Probability Pen Pals , which came out in September. But I had no idea they were going to accelerate production this much. But that wasn't all. I also got a contract for the entire Mathematical Lives series, even though I've only written two of the planned six books so far. I'm planning to start the third volume, David Blackwell and the Deadliest Duel , after the Christmas mayhem is over. It's been more than thirty years since I've gotten a contract for something I haven't written yet. Not since my You Can't Do That On Television days. My writing is in a really good place right now, and it's not a place I ever ex...

Imagine a TV show with no sex, no violence, no guns or explosions, just engineers designing new things, figuring out how to make them and then landing the contracts to sell them. It would never work, right? Well, not in this country. But elsewhere...? Shitamachi Rocket returned to Japanese TV screens this season for a second run, telling the story of a little factory (about the same size as the ones I've worked for) where they build tractor engines to pay the bills, but where they also build parts for rocket engines, prosthetic heart valves, and other neat stuff. There's a bit of silly melodrama about corporate politics with their customers, but for the most part the story is driven by the quest to overcome the technical and manufacturing challenges they're presented with. Thanks to the internet, I watch far more Japanese scripted programming than American these days. Not all of it is like Shitamachi Rocket , of course, but real-world math and science turn up a...

What a week it's been. People in day-job land have been checking on me and fretting about me, ever since the surprise news on Monday that I'm being replaced as Quality Manager and moved to the position of Senior Quality Engineer. Taking over the manager job will be the quality engineer from the Mexicali plant who's been coming up here periodically to help us out. I've actually been trying to get him relocated here permanently for the past year. As you might imagine, though, the way he's being moved here isn't what I expected. I was surprised, but I'm not really all that upset. Back in 2009, I got half my department taken away was saddled with writing instruction manuals after they laid off the technical writer - that upset me a lot more. This time, I'm taking it a lot better than some of the other people I've heard from. As I said, I've been wanting this guy to move here, so I think it's a good thing for the company to do it. Many...

Tonight is a big milestone, as I send off my draft of Florence Nightingale: The Lady With the Diagrams to my publisher. That's two of the six Mathematical Lives books complete, in less than a year and a half. It's about time I did something to promote The Probability Pen Pals , since it's been out for a few months. Here's the Royal Fireworks flyer for it: This weekend, I've been working on a couple of promotional essays. Here's the first, which I wrote in Q&A form. See what you think. The Mathematical Lives: The People Behind the Numbers The Probability Pen Pals is something new for you. How did this project get started? Royal Fireworks pitched the idea of doing a biography series about mathematicians. I'd never thought about writing biographies before, but it made sense! After all, I've written three historical novels ( Liberty Girl , Unswept Graves and The Eyes of the Enemy ), and I've also written the Mathematical Nights ...

I did my best to hide from election news yesterday, but modern technology can be both persuasive and insistent. There was good news to be had, for sure - the Democrats took back the House, so yay, we're not going to go full-on fascist. But for me, there was a lot of disappointment, too. If, as Jim Wallis at Sojourners said, the election was a referendum on white nationalism, then large chunks of the country just told us they're okay with it. The possibility that they simply don't know who Trump is and what he stands for is no longer credible. Not after the campaign run-up we've seen these past few weeks. And yet, the first thing I noticed in the early polling results yesterday was that the Trumpy parts of the country were getting Trumpier. They weren't running away from Trump. They were running toward him. And the most discouraging thing to me was watching my home state of Indiana leading the charge. As the Midwestern states around it all started swingi...

Writing is hard. Writing well is harder, but so very worth it. I'm focused primarily on my biography series these days, but I have some fiction ideas that I think about when I get the chance. I've been reading some of my never-finished and unpublished work, too. Some of it is good, and makes me think I should go back to it sometime. The Eyes of the Enemy was put on hold twice, but still got finished and published. Maybe a couple of these other two stories can, too. But some of what I read makes me cringe, either at something I did that I've learned not to do or at something I did that I haven't figured out yet. And something else, too - it's made me realize how nearly two years in Trump's America have changed me. I'm a straight, white, cis-gendered man, and in America that means I'm the default setting. I could write every character as someone exactly like me, and that would be considered okay. And of course I've done that before. Whe...

After this past week, I needed something to restore my hope for the future. This afternoon, I found it. I have a new hero, too - Dr. Serena McCalla of Jericho High School on Long Island, champion science fair coach. That's my brother's turf. I wonder if either he or my sister-in-law knows her. It's been quite a while now since I realized that I couldn't do anything about the mess our country is in right now, and that my attention and my energies would be of more use if I focused them on my books. Recent events have only confirmed that belief, and now the election is just a few weeks away. But it's been really hard to tear my attention away from the unending disaster that's been unfolding. Things being as bad as you thought they'd be, and then some, is hard not to think about. Fortunately, there's this little documentary called Science Fair . It follows a group of students as they qualify for and then participate in the 2017 The Internatio...

Wow, I went the entire month of August without writing a blog post. I thought about writing one a number of times, but it never came together. One of the big reasons why not, though, is that the subject most on my mind didn't make sense. Why write a blog post about why you weren't writing blog posts? Yet here I am, doing pretty much that. It's been a terrific summer for my writing. For some other things, too, but my writing has gotten into a rhythm I've rarely seen since I had to go back to the day-job world. Talking to my publisher at the California Homeschool Conference back in June, hearing how excited they are about the Math Biography series I'm doing, made me even more fired up about writing it. Talking to people at the Satellites & Education Conference in July encouraged me even more. This is an enormous project, the biggest one I've ever taken on, and I don't want to leave it sitting around. It means too much to me. At the same tim...

The internet is conspiring to tell me something today, or rather, to remind me of a topic I revisit from time to time. This morning, Patheos.com had not one, but two commentaries on something written by a conservative Christian blogger calling herself "The Transformed Wife," and claiming that "Men Prefer Debt-Free Virgins Without Tattoos." One of the responses began, "My poor husband will be shocked to hear this..." and tried to refute the claim point-by-point. The other took the argument to another level, saying, "Since when is being a Christian woman about making yourself pleasing to men? Are we as Christians supposed to conform ourselves to men? Or are we supposed to conform ourselves to the Lord?" I found myself flashing back to my marriage, where my ex-wife spent a great deal of time trying to make herself into a "good Christian wife" who would appeal to a "good Christian husband." The fact that I hadn't ...

I've lost count of the number of books on my shelves that have bookmarks in them, marking where I left off reading them as I juggle and flit from one to the next. One that I've picked up again recently is Secondhand Time , the massive oral history from Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexeivich, chronicling the time between the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin. One thing that's struck me is how similar the people Alexeivich interviewed are to the people supporting Trump here in the US. It's no wonder the Putin playbook has worked so well on them. The older Russian generation, the one that remembered Soviet times, felt lost and adrift in the new Russia, and that made them long for the Soviet past. One interviewee recounted the year he spent in prison, being interrogated and beaten because his wife had been caught up in one of Stalin's purges. Despite all he went through - including the loss of that wife, who didn't survive her own impri...

Wow, look at that. It's been weeks since my last post here, and I only posted once in all of June. I've just gotten back from my annual July 4 Indiana trip, where I tried to minimize my social media exposure. I think it was good for me. I've been thinking a lot lately about how much I want to interact with this electronic beast we've created together. Right before my trip, I made what I plan to be my final post on my old LiveJournal. I was surprised by the response it got - or rather, I was surprised it got any response at all, given that I hadn't posted there since last October. At the moment, I'm working on the second of my Mathematical Lives biography series, about Florence Nightingale and her advances in the field of statistics. When she was in her early 20s, she hadn't yet decided to become a nurse. She felt a spiritual calling to do something for the poor, but she hadn't yet figured out what it was. At the same time, her family ex...

The weirdest anime of the season has offered me a new perspective on the writing experience. Hisone and Masotan tells the story of Hisone, a young woman in the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force who becomes a "D-Pilot," someone who flies a dragon (her specific dragon is named Masotan). In the world of the story, dragons are real, and are a vital part of Japan's survival as a nation. But the public can't know about them, so the JASDF disguises them as military planes when they take to the air. Unlike in most dragon stories, though, Hisone and the other D-Pilots don't get to ride on top of the dragons. Oh no, that would be too mundane. In this story, the dragons swallow the D-Pilots, who must then fly the mission from inside the dragons' guts (which somehow transform into a hi-tech cockpit display). When the mission is over, the dragons obligingly barf their D-Pilots back out. Yes, I know it's silly, and I'm leaving out a number of problemati...

It wasn't until the end of my fourth day on San Nicolas Island that I realized I'd been holding an endangered species in the palm of my hand. The little white plants, so small and fragile looking that I kept having to make sure I wasn't burying them in the dirt, were San Nicolas Island buckwheat . Just like the island foxes or the scrub jays on Santa Cruz Island, the local buckwheat plants have evolved to the point where they were different from their mainland relatives. (The foxes, in fact, are different subspecies from island to island.) The next day, on our last morning of planting, I took extra care to make sure I planted them properly. Native Americans lived on San Nicolas for thousands of years, and got along just fine. Then in the 1800s, we Europeans showed up and decided we could use the island for sheep ranching. Within a few decades, the place was trashed. The sheep thrived during the rainy years, then ate everything during the dry years. With no plan...

I first sat down to write this entry the other day, but before I could get a word out, I was interrupted by a day-job crisis that put my entire premise to the test. Fortunately, I got through it in one piece. As I've pointed out before, the news media's business model depends on keeping your attention, so you'll stay tuned through all their commercials. One way they do that is by trying to convince you that something you value is about to be taken away. At the most basic level, they try to make you think your life is in jeopardy. That's where all those local TV news stories come from - "Can your pet hamster kill you? Details at eleven!" You see it in sports, too. As a lifelong fan of the Indy 500, I've been reading articles explaining why IndyCar racing is on death's door ever since the split between the Indy Racing League and CART - twenty-two years ago. You'd think surviving a decade would be long enough to get off the critical list, l...

Our job on San Nicolas Island was part of an ongoing project, restoring the natural habitat along a three-mile stretch of roadside terrain. The Navy dug up it to replace the water pipe that runs from the Navy's desalinization plant up to the main water tanks on the highest point of the island. Channel Islands Restoration started the project by collecting seeds from all around the island and growing them in a nursery built near the base, and now it was time for planting. The hope is that the plants will grow and propagate, until the entire roadside is full of native plants. One evening, we got to see an earlier project that had been nicknamed "the Google Site," because the Navy Resource Manager in charge had said he wanted to look up the island on Google Earth and watch the planted area grow from year to year as the plants multiplied. Naval Base Ventura County, which includes San Nicolas, just won an award for natural resource management among the nation's milita...

I've been back from my island adventure for a couple of days now, and what an experience it was. A lot of hard work, to be sure. I have new respect for the agricultural workers who do that sort of stuff all the time. Our little group of 13 volunteers and 5 regular staff put more than 1800 plants into the ground, and set up a drip-feed irrigation system for 1600 of them. And even with all that going on, we still had time to visit some incredible spots around the island, full of weird rock formations and tidal pools, in the company of huge elephant seals and little island foxes. (This was the logo on the backs of our orange traffic vests. Looks much better on a t-shirt, don't you think?) I'm still processing all the stuff I saw and did, and deciding which things I want to post about. I took a few dozen pages of notes, but since I wasn't allowed to take photos, you'd have to rely on my writing everything out. But there is one thing I wanted to say right of...

I'm pretty sure this is the only time I'll ever quote Playboy magazine, so don't miss it. The January 1985 issue included an essay by James Baldwin, " Here Be Dragons ," in which he explored issues of sexuality and gender identity (decades before the current interest in non-binary identification) and related them to his own experiences. (If you want to check out the essay, please be aware that it contains pretty frank descriptions of adult situations. It was in Playboy , after all.) What struck me most was his assessment of what it means to be an American man: "The American ideal, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden -- as an unpatriotic act -- that the American boy evolve into the complexity of ...