Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

After this past week, I needed something to restore my hope for the future. This afternoon, I found it. I have a new hero, too - Dr. Serena McCalla of Jericho High School on Long Island, champion science fair coach. That's my brother's turf. I wonder if either he or my sister-in-law knows her. It's been quite a while now since I realized that I couldn't do anything about the mess our country is in right now, and that my attention and my energies would be of more use if I focused them on my books. Recent events have only confirmed that belief, and now the election is just a few weeks away. But it's been really hard to tear my attention away from the unending disaster that's been unfolding. Things being as bad as you thought they'd be, and then some, is hard not to think about. Fortunately, there's this little documentary called Science Fair . It follows a group of students as they qualify for and then participate in the 2017 The Internatio...

Wow, I went the entire month of August without writing a blog post. I thought about writing one a number of times, but it never came together. One of the big reasons why not, though, is that the subject most on my mind didn't make sense. Why write a blog post about why you weren't writing blog posts? Yet here I am, doing pretty much that. It's been a terrific summer for my writing. For some other things, too, but my writing has gotten into a rhythm I've rarely seen since I had to go back to the day-job world. Talking to my publisher at the California Homeschool Conference back in June, hearing how excited they are about the Math Biography series I'm doing, made me even more fired up about writing it. Talking to people at the Satellites & Education Conference in July encouraged me even more. This is an enormous project, the biggest one I've ever taken on, and I don't want to leave it sitting around. It means too much to me. At the same tim...

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've lost count of the number of books on my shelves that have bookmarks in them, marking where I left off reading them as I juggle and flit from one to the next. One that I've picked up again recently is Secondhand Time , the massive oral history from Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexeivich, chronicling the time between the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin. One thing that's struck me is how similar the people Alexeivich interviewed are to the people supporting Trump here in the US. It's no wonder the Putin playbook has worked so well on them. The older Russian generation, the one that remembered Soviet times, felt lost and adrift in the new Russia, and that made them long for the Soviet past. One interviewee recounted the year he spent in prison, being interrogated and beaten because his wife had been caught up in one of Stalin's purges. Despite all he went through - including the loss of that wife, who didn't survive her own impri...

Wow, look at that. It's been weeks since my last post here, and I only posted once in all of June. I've just gotten back from my annual July 4 Indiana trip, where I tried to minimize my social media exposure. I think it was good for me. I've been thinking a lot lately about how much I want to interact with this electronic beast we've created together. Right before my trip, I made what I plan to be my final post on my old LiveJournal. I was surprised by the response it got - or rather, I was surprised it got any response at all, given that I hadn't posted there since last October. At the moment, I'm working on the second of my Mathematical Lives biography series, about Florence Nightingale and her advances in the field of statistics. When she was in her early 20s, she hadn't yet decided to become a nurse. She felt a spiritual calling to do something for the poor, but she hadn't yet figured out what it was. At the same time, her family ex...

The weirdest anime of the season has offered me a new perspective on the writing experience. Hisone and Masotan tells the story of Hisone, a young woman in the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force who becomes a "D-Pilot," someone who flies a dragon (her specific dragon is named Masotan). In the world of the story, dragons are real, and are a vital part of Japan's survival as a nation. But the public can't know about them, so the JASDF disguises them as military planes when they take to the air. Unlike in most dragon stories, though, Hisone and the other D-Pilots don't get to ride on top of the dragons. Oh no, that would be too mundane. In this story, the dragons swallow the D-Pilots, who must then fly the mission from inside the dragons' guts (which somehow transform into a hi-tech cockpit display). When the mission is over, the dragons obligingly barf their D-Pilots back out. Yes, I know it's silly, and I'm leaving out a number of problemati...

It wasn't until the end of my fourth day on San Nicolas Island that I realized I'd been holding an endangered species in the palm of my hand. The little white plants, so small and fragile looking that I kept having to make sure I wasn't burying them in the dirt, were San Nicolas Island buckwheat . Just like the island foxes or the scrub jays on Santa Cruz Island, the local buckwheat plants have evolved to the point where they were different from their mainland relatives. (The foxes, in fact, are different subspecies from island to island.) The next day, on our last morning of planting, I took extra care to make sure I planted them properly. Native Americans lived on San Nicolas for thousands of years, and got along just fine. Then in the 1800s, we Europeans showed up and decided we could use the island for sheep ranching. Within a few decades, the place was trashed. The sheep thrived during the rainy years, then ate everything during the dry years. With no plan...