Promo Time
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 series, which incorporates math into the story. This project combines elements of both.
Don't mathematicians lead really boring lives?
I suppose some do, the same as any other people. But not all of them. Just look at 17th Century Frenchman Blaise Pascal, who's featured in The Probability Pen Pals. When he was a baby, people thought he'd been cursed by a witch, and when he was a teenager, his father had to go on the run from France's Cardinal Richelieu. During his life, not only did he invent probability theory, but he also invented one of the first mechanical calculators and helped prove the existence of a vacuum.
It sounds like you could write a Pascal biography that was about more than just math.
You could, and people have. But what I wanted to do in my book was to focus in on a specific incident in the lives of Pascal and Fermat, involving a specific math problem they're known for. This is something I'll carry through the rest of the Mathematical Lives series. Each subject faced some kind of mathematical challenge that either defined their career or significantly affected its course. We'll look at what those challenges were, and go step-by-step through the solutions.
So how does that idea work in this book?
For The Probability Pen Pals, we're focusing on a time when a friend of Pascal's asked him for some gambling advice. When Pascal took an interest in something, he attacked it from every angle, and he didn't stop until he'd learned everything he could about it. Rather than just give his friend a couple of tips and be done with it, he invented a whole new field of mathematics! Or at least he tried to. He needed help. That's where Pierre de Fermat comes in.
What can you tell me about him? Was his life interesting, too?
The interesting thing about Fermat was that he didn't do mathematics professionally. He was a lawyer who spent most of his career in local government, and only worked on math for fun. But even though he was just an "amateur," he made some amazing discoveries. He invented much of analytic geometry – the technique of representing lines and curves with equations – around the same time as Rene Descartes, so much that Descartes accused him of plagiarism. There was a pretty big ruckus about that.
How do we know about the work Pascal and Fermat did together?
They did the whole thing through letters they wrote to each other. In fact, they never met in person their entire lives. We still have seven of those letters, so we can see the way they traded ideas back and forth. They took completely different approaches, and Pascal had trouble understanding Fermat's method. But ultimately, they figured it out.
Does that kind of collaboration happen often? I thought mathematicians stood in front of chalkboards or something.
It happens all the time! True, a lot is done working alone, but some of the best math is done by people working together. As the Mathematical Lives series goes on, you'll find that every mathematician we cover has both mentors and collaborators – people who helped them develop their skills, and people who helped them solve their toughest challenges.
Who else will you be writing about?
Right now, my plans include two people whose work launched important new fields – Benoit Mandelbrot with fractal geometry and Edward Lorenz with chaos theory. Another of my subjects, David Blackwell, worked in another new field, game theory. And though some people still think math is a boys' subject, there are a pair of women in the series, too. One of them is Ada Lovelace, who invented the computer algorithm a century before there were computers, and the other is someone you don't normally think of as a mathematician – Florence Nightingale.
I thought she was a nurse who went around holding a lamp.
She was, but she also spent more than half her life working as a social reformer, campaigning for proper public sanitation. In that effort, one of her best skills was communicating her points through statistics. Her report on the need for reform in the British Army was the first time anyone really presented statistics to the general public, both in numerical tables and in diagrams, where she was especially innovative.
Some of those topics sound pretty advanced. Are you sure middle school kids can handle them?
Well no, I don't expect them to learn everything about these subjects. I can't even do that! But the basic concepts behind each field are surprisingly relatable. Fractal geometry – What kind of math lets you describe the roughness of a mountain or the puffiness of a cloud? Chaos theory – Why is it so hard to predict the weather? The reader gets to learn the stories of the people who asked those questions, and see the steps those people took on their way to finding answers.
I can see how that would work.
The key is exposure. All of the math subjects in this series are going to be important for the STEM fields of the future. My readers may not be ready for some of them yet, but if they can see what those subjects are and get a basic understanding of the concepts involved, they might get into one or more of those subjects later on. Think of it as planting seeds. Mathematical seeds.
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 series, which incorporates math into the story. This project combines elements of both.
Don't mathematicians lead really boring lives?
I suppose some do, the same as any other people. But not all of them. Just look at 17th Century Frenchman Blaise Pascal, who's featured in The Probability Pen Pals. When he was a baby, people thought he'd been cursed by a witch, and when he was a teenager, his father had to go on the run from France's Cardinal Richelieu. During his life, not only did he invent probability theory, but he also invented one of the first mechanical calculators and helped prove the existence of a vacuum.
It sounds like you could write a Pascal biography that was about more than just math.
You could, and people have. But what I wanted to do in my book was to focus in on a specific incident in the lives of Pascal and Fermat, involving a specific math problem they're known for. This is something I'll carry through the rest of the Mathematical Lives series. Each subject faced some kind of mathematical challenge that either defined their career or significantly affected its course. We'll look at what those challenges were, and go step-by-step through the solutions.
So how does that idea work in this book?
For The Probability Pen Pals, we're focusing on a time when a friend of Pascal's asked him for some gambling advice. When Pascal took an interest in something, he attacked it from every angle, and he didn't stop until he'd learned everything he could about it. Rather than just give his friend a couple of tips and be done with it, he invented a whole new field of mathematics! Or at least he tried to. He needed help. That's where Pierre de Fermat comes in.
What can you tell me about him? Was his life interesting, too?
The interesting thing about Fermat was that he didn't do mathematics professionally. He was a lawyer who spent most of his career in local government, and only worked on math for fun. But even though he was just an "amateur," he made some amazing discoveries. He invented much of analytic geometry – the technique of representing lines and curves with equations – around the same time as Rene Descartes, so much that Descartes accused him of plagiarism. There was a pretty big ruckus about that.
How do we know about the work Pascal and Fermat did together?
They did the whole thing through letters they wrote to each other. In fact, they never met in person their entire lives. We still have seven of those letters, so we can see the way they traded ideas back and forth. They took completely different approaches, and Pascal had trouble understanding Fermat's method. But ultimately, they figured it out.
Does that kind of collaboration happen often? I thought mathematicians stood in front of chalkboards or something.
It happens all the time! True, a lot is done working alone, but some of the best math is done by people working together. As the Mathematical Lives series goes on, you'll find that every mathematician we cover has both mentors and collaborators – people who helped them develop their skills, and people who helped them solve their toughest challenges.
Who else will you be writing about?
Right now, my plans include two people whose work launched important new fields – Benoit Mandelbrot with fractal geometry and Edward Lorenz with chaos theory. Another of my subjects, David Blackwell, worked in another new field, game theory. And though some people still think math is a boys' subject, there are a pair of women in the series, too. One of them is Ada Lovelace, who invented the computer algorithm a century before there were computers, and the other is someone you don't normally think of as a mathematician – Florence Nightingale.
I thought she was a nurse who went around holding a lamp.
She was, but she also spent more than half her life working as a social reformer, campaigning for proper public sanitation. In that effort, one of her best skills was communicating her points through statistics. Her report on the need for reform in the British Army was the first time anyone really presented statistics to the general public, both in numerical tables and in diagrams, where she was especially innovative.
Some of those topics sound pretty advanced. Are you sure middle school kids can handle them?
Well no, I don't expect them to learn everything about these subjects. I can't even do that! But the basic concepts behind each field are surprisingly relatable. Fractal geometry – What kind of math lets you describe the roughness of a mountain or the puffiness of a cloud? Chaos theory – Why is it so hard to predict the weather? The reader gets to learn the stories of the people who asked those questions, and see the steps those people took on their way to finding answers.
I can see how that would work.
The key is exposure. All of the math subjects in this series are going to be important for the STEM fields of the future. My readers may not be ready for some of them yet, but if they can see what those subjects are and get a basic understanding of the concepts involved, they might get into one or more of those subjects later on. Think of it as planting seeds. Mathematical seeds.
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