Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

As of tomorrow, I will be working from home for the duration of the coronavirus emergency. I'm still on call to go back to the factory if I'm needed, but I don't think that's likely. Both my boss and the one other person in the Quality office think they'll be more productive if they keep coming in to work. That puzzled me at first, but as I was planning and organizing for my time away, a thought came to me. Most people don't know how to do this. They think about working from home, and they don't even know where to start. But I have, and I do. I spent about a year in 2001-2 writing three books, one of which, Liberty Girl , is still in print. Some other people in the office have worked from home before too, and they're all set to go. Others, not so much. If you're one of those people suddenly finding themselves tossed into the deep end of the work-from-home world, here are a couple of tips: #1 - CNN has an off button. Use it. (Okay, t...

Suppose Jesus Christ really was who he said he was. I know not everyone who reads me believes that, but work with me here. If Jesus really was who he said he was, then he could have placed himself on any throne he wanted, anywhere in the world, at any time in history. He could have made himself Caesar. He could have put himself on the throne of Genghis Khan or Ramses II. He could have ruled from Tenochtitlan or Constantinople. He could have placed himself in Buckingham Palace or the White House, the Kremlin or the Forbidden City. But instead, he chose to be a peasant from a conquered people, in a backwater of the Roman Empire. He chose to be a nobody from nowhere. What does that tell us? When I was at Dacor, back in the 90s, I used to think that if I worked my way up the corporate ladder, then I could fix everything when I got to the top. I could put a stop to the ridiculous project schedules and make sure we had proper time and resources to get new products right the firs...

I'm really tired of feeling helpless. I don't really make New Year's Resolutions, but there are definitely some changes I need to make. I have so many different writing ideas in my head, but I've never been able to work on more than one at a time. It's one of the main frustrations about having to work a day job, because I feel like I'd be able to write so many more of my ideas with the additional time. A year ago, I told myself that if I couldn't write more than one project at a time, I could at least make notes for future books while working on my current one - but not even that has worked. I kept waiting for it to happen, when what I needed to do was make it happen. So I took this weekend off from my Ada Lovelace biography - now in its final chapter - and did some reading and note-taking. I didn't make all that much tangible progress, but I feel like I learned a lot about how to put stories together, what I'll be capable of while I'm...

Writing about Victorian women is hard. You have to fight through all sorts of competing agendas to figure out what really happened in their lives. I first noticed it when I wrote my Florence Nightingale biography a year and a half ago. The previous biographies I read had radically different takes on her life, and especially her relationships with her mother and her sister. One book wanted to make her mother the bad guy, responsible for Florence's misery before she was allowed to go into nursing. Another wanted to make her sister the bad guy, and another wanted both. A number of the books I looked at and discarded wanted to turn Florence into a paragon of caring - but properly submissive - Christian womanly virtue. Florence was actually a Unitarian, and if she'd been submissive, we'd never have heard of her. Then I found the wonderful online archive of Florence's papers, established and maintained at Canada's University of Guelph, and it revealed other thi...

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 ...

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...