Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

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

We're coming to the end of Advent, and with it the end of my self-imposed ban on making political posts on social media. That was more difficult than I expected, but it showed me some interesting things and made me look at my motivations. At the end of Lent last year, I kept up my ban on watching cable news. I don't want to keep up this ban as well, but I do want to do things a bit differently. The most important thing I have to remember - that we should all remember, actually - is to stay focused. Not posting about politics made me want to read less politics, too. I thought more about what I was really interested in, and less about what was just trying to draw my attention. So much of what goes on is just noise, spewed out there to confuse us or inflame us or keep us from noticing anything else. The last thing I should be doing is adding to it for no good reason. When I do focus my attention, two major subjects emerge as most important to me. The subject most on

Michelle Obama told CNN that she and Barack were going to support whoever wins the Democratic Primary, and that trying to choose a winner now is like trying to predict the World Series champion after the first few games of the regular season. It's about time somebody said something sensible. I'm still refusing to back anyone for 2020 until at least the beginning of 2020, but I'm getting a better idea what what I'm looking for. I didn't watch the first Democratic debates, and I avoided most of the noise surrounding it, but I caught enough of it to see that the 2020 Presidential Election will be a contest between three powerful mass emotional forces. The first one we know about it. Republicans have anointed Donald Trump as their messiah, and nothing is going to convince them otherwise. Democrats can't do anything about it - and that's a good thing, because they have to deal with the other two. Progressives look at the big problems that have been re

I'm currently on a factory inspection tour, first going to one of the day-job world's suppliers in Cleveland and now going to their supplier in Cookeville, Tennessee. One side benefit, though, is that I flew into Nashville and got to swing by Vanderbilt, visiting for the first time in more than thirty years. The old place looks pretty good. Leafier than I remember in spots, and lots of buildings that weren't there before. But plenty for me to remember. My most important destination was the student media offices, where I spent so much time in the mid-1980s. They've expanded well beyond "the tunnel," the bottom floor of the student center. Everything is digital now. My old yearbook and newspaper darkrooms have been merged into a brightly lit conference room, with windows looking into the old newspaper office turned news room and soon to be a recording studio, I think. The old yearbook room was partitioned off into offices, but now they're about to

There's one important trait that fiction writers and mathematicians share. Both have to take things that don't exist and treat them as if they do. I was doing a book event a while back, when an older gentleman came up to my table and asked what my Mathematical Nights books were about. After he'd heard some of my usual pitch, that it was about a girl who could see math-impaired ghosts, vampires, etc., he frowned and gruffly replied, "I don't believe in any of that stuff." I replied that I didn't either, but I could imagine what they might be like. Similarly, any middle schooler can tell you that negative numbers don't have square roots, but one day long ago, mathematicians decided to imagine what the square root of a negative number might look like, and then explored what the consequences might be. "Imaginary numbers" turned out to be quite handy for a lot of things. Mathematicians are good at metaphors, too. After all, what is a

It was the most shocking anime plot twist I've seen in more than a decade, and for a time I wondered if the hand of Joss Whedon was at work. Two weeks ago, GeGeGe no Kitaro - a children's show - killed off its most popular character, out of nowhere and at the hands of another popular character. Let's see if I can give you a summary without running on too long. Neko-musume (the name literally means "cat-daughter") is a yokai , a Japanese fairy-like creature who looks like a stylish teenage girl most of the time but turns into more of a feral cat-like creature in order to fight (or when she smells fish). She is the best friend of Inuyama Mana, a middle school girl who serves as the audience's link into the world of the yokai . As the episode two weeks ago unfolds, the Big Bad tricks Neko-musume into attacking Mana's mother, just as Mana walks in to find her mother lying on the floor bleeding out. Mana reacts the way you might expect - only the Big Ba

There's an often far-too-brief window in a child's life, around the tween years, when the universe opens up before them and reveals its wonder and glory and magic and mystery in ways they hadn't realized before - and often, they respond to the power that opens up around them by finding their own power within themselves. Those years are where stories like Stranger Things or The Hunger Games come from, or E.T. a generation earlier, or even the Oz franchise a century ago. In Japan, they've been celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Boogiepop franchise, a series of light novels that set the standard for the light novel genre that came alive in the 2000s. The story is about an ordinary, mild mannered girl named Miyashita Touka, who becomes a mysterious supernatural hero named Boogiepop and battles threats to the world. One big difference from the typical superhero story is that Touka is completely unaware of Boogiepop's existence, and it's never completel

It's been a while since I've posted anything here. I'm full speed ahead on my books, and the rest of my life has taken up everything else. But today seems like a good time to make a point or two. The Mueller Report is out, and I think the moral of the story is that we should never have been expecting a superhero to swoop in and rescue us from the Trumpocalypse. I understand the temptation. I've felt it myself. With each new national embarrassment and each new attack on our democracy, it's been tempting to think that Robert Mueller had uncovered something so devastating that when he released it, the whole Trump empire would collapse. But that turned out to be magical thinking. Perhaps it always was. And perhaps it's just as well. The FOX propaganda machine had already done a good job of numbing its followers to the whole Russia situation. Mueller could have turned up video of Trump and Putin sneaking into a polling place together and tampering with

For most of my childhood, I lived right next door to Park Tudor School in Indianapolis, a lush, sprawling campus that used to be the Eli Lilly family's apple orchard and country retreat. My parents both taught there. As far as I was concerned, that meant we owned the place. My friends and I made up a Frisbee golf course around the campus. We went sledding on the hills in winter. We launched model rockets off the athletic fields. It was our back yard and playground for years. One time, my brother and I were invited to join a game of Capture the Flag some friends were planning to play on the campus after dark. The thought that such a game might not be a good idea never occurred to us. It was our back yard and our playground. Why couldn't we do it? Well, the police officers who showed up after about half an hour didn't see it that way. And they weren't impressed when I tried to tell them my parents worked there, so everything was all right. Imagine that! Th

You don't have to watch anime for long before you encounter stories about yokai (also known as ayakashi ), the various ghosts and otherworldly creatures said to inhabit the Japanese islands, just beyond the range of normal human sight. Some of my all-time favorites feature them, including the long-running GeGeGe no Kitaro , currently in its sixth incarnation. A common feature in these shows is that the main characters often get into trouble and have to turn to some elder-figure - a grandparent or grandparent stand-in, usually - who knows the old stories about the creatures who lived with humans during the old times, before science and technology came along and drove magic away. That trope isn't unique to Japan, of course. It's been a regular feature in European stories too, and I expect it's in stories from Africa and other parts of Asia as well. Here in America, though, we have a problem. Here in America, any magical creatures from the old times wouldn't

African-American mathematician David Blackwell's first teaching job was at Southern University, in Louisiana. When he arrived there in 1942, it was his first time living in the Old South, and his first time experiencing the Old South's Jim Crow laws. The first time he got on a New Orleans streetcar, he was fascinated by the little signs that plugged into the top of the seats, reading "White" on one side and "Colored" on the other. The idea was that the signs could be moved back and forth, depending on how many white people there were who needed seats. If, like me, you've never seen one before, just watch the episode "Rosa" from this year's Doctor Who season. Blackwell had never seen one before, either, and it amused him. When he got off the streetcar, he took it with him. In the oral history interviews he did for the University of California, Blackwell said, "I, of course, accepted segregation but I didn't take it very