Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

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...

The internet is conspiring to tell me something today, or rather, to remind me of a topic I revisit from time to time. This morning, Patheos.com had not one, but two commentaries on something written by a conservative Christian blogger calling herself "The Transformed Wife," and claiming that "Men Prefer Debt-Free Virgins Without Tattoos." One of the responses began, "My poor husband will be shocked to hear this..." and tried to refute the claim point-by-point. The other took the argument to another level, saying, "Since when is being a Christian woman about making yourself pleasing to men? Are we as Christians supposed to conform ourselves to men? Or are we supposed to conform ourselves to the Lord?" I found myself flashing back to my marriage, where my ex-wife spent a great deal of time trying to make herself into a "good Christian wife" who would appeal to a "good Christian husband." The fact that I hadn't ...

I'm pretty sure this is the only time I'll ever quote Playboy magazine, so don't miss it. The January 1985 issue included an essay by James Baldwin, " Here Be Dragons ," in which he explored issues of sexuality and gender identity (decades before the current interest in non-binary identification) and related them to his own experiences. (If you want to check out the essay, please be aware that it contains pretty frank descriptions of adult situations. It was in Playboy , after all.) What struck me most was his assessment of what it means to be an American man: "The American ideal, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden -- as an unpatriotic act -- that the American boy evolve into the complexity of ...

Back in ancient times, when I was married and trying to be an Evangelical - and not doing very well at either - I heard a lot of talk about "witnessing" . That is to say, essentially giving people a sales pitch inviting them to "accept Christ into their lives" (or "be washed in the blood of the lamb," for the more poetic types). Having been raised a properly low-key Episcopalian (not to mention being an introvert), that kind of thing was just too weird for me. But I remember this one "tract," one of the little pamphlets you could buy and hand out to people as part of your routine. It depicted God as this brilliant light that was too wonderful to take your eyes away from, and it depicted non-Christians as standing with their backs to the light, stubbornly refusing to turn around and look. How ironic, then, that I find myself thinking of this tract when it comes to the people who want to Make America Great Again, many of who are white Evang...

To tell you the truth, when the first sexual harassment claim against Al Franken came out, I was surprised that it was the only one. Not that I think Al Franken is a bad guy, which I don't, but because of where he came from. The type of shenanigans he was being accused of (and photographed doing, in at least one instance) fit perfectly with the brand of humor he wrote on Saturday Night Live , and that brand was what made him a success. It was his livelihood for a long time, a part of his public persona. Of course he did stuff like that. However ... That doesn't let him off the hook. Yes, there have been complaints already about Franken paying the penalty while Donald Trump and Roy Moore are still around. That's not important, unless you agree with Republicans that having power is more important, even if it means you have to follow your leaders into the sewer. I thought Franken was doing a great job as a senator, but that just makes his resignation a tragedy, no...

Thanks to that massive Chinese hoax the rest of the world knows as "climate change," we here in Southern California now face the risk of massive wildfires pretty much all year round. And at the moment, we're being hit harder than we have in years. I don't know what the TV networks are showing, but I suspect that today at least, the fire getting everyone's attention is the one burning in the Sepulveda Pass, because it's near the Getty Center and all the expensive homes. But that's actually the smallest of the major fires burning. The one here in Ventura County, with smoke seeping through the office windows near me even as I type, is much bigger and has done more damage. The weather is what got these fires going, and it's also what makes them so hard to put out. Yesterday, the wind was blowing too hard for water-dropping airplanes and helicopters to fly, so the ground crews had to make do on their own. If that keeps up, they may have no choic...

One year into the Trumpocalypse, and I have a number of different thoughts trying to crowd their way through my fingers and onto the screen. Let's see which ones make it out here. For the past year, I've thought, read, written, talked and listened, trying to make sense of what happened and what we can do about it. Some of the things I've thought about haven't been pleasant. It's "my people" who did this to us. "My" Midwestern, Christian white folks. People I've known my whole life were a part of it. That's been very hard to understand - and the things I have understood are hard to accept. At the end of the day, it all keeps coming back to race. Bigotry in general, really. Women and LGBT people are in the crosshairs too. But more than anything else, it keeps coming back to race. It's easy to see when Trump does something like defend the white supremacy marchers in Charlottesville. But it keeps showing up elsewhere, t...

The demonstrators at Charlottesville were misunderstood. That's one of the things I was hearing last night. They're not like the white supremacists of old. They don't think white people are better than everyone else. They just want equality. If Black Lives Matter, they want White Lives to matter too. If there's a Gay Pride Month, they want a Straight Pride Month. What's wrong with that? A lot of these demonstrators looked like they were college-age, and in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that when I was that age, I too had some ignorant viewpoints and did some insensitive things. (Although really, if I was that age and had been there in Charlottesville, I'd like to think the swastikas might have tipped me off that I was in the wrong crowd.) I can see how a young white person, especially someone who's grown up sheltered and privileged, might not realize that in our society, White Lives always matter and every month is Straight Prid...

One of my favorite stories about my mother is something you might not expect. She was the "math coach" at my school when I was there, which meant she chose the students who would go to all the various math competitions. My senior year, she had more students interested in the annual contest at Terre Haute's Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology than there were slots available, and so she decided to give us all a test to see who got to go. I assumed that since I was her son, I'd get preferential treatment, and so I didn't take the test seriously. As a result, I made some silly mistakes and scored below several of the other students. And yes, my mom left me at home. Naturally, I wasn't very happy about that at the time, but now that I'm older and wiser, I think it was one of her best parenting moments. She taught me to check my privilege - not in those words, of course, because people didn't say that in the early 1980s. But she reminded me that I...