Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

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...