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