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...

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...