Women who struggle with Pi

I have these two novels that I'm working on; the first is a crime novel, and the second is a road novel that I write longhand, when I'm out traveling. The progress is somewhat slow. It feels like I'll never get my writing up to speed.

I have some reports and a science paper I need write before Christmas. But that's my job, and it doesn't really count. I enjoy writing the science stuff too, and my amateur fiction writing is improving my science writing, which is fine.

So, I thought that maybe it would be wise to do some smaller writing projects, just to practise, before I return to my novels. Recently I got some ideas for a series of three or four short stories, with a common vague theme: Women who struggle with Pi, you know, this math constant 3.14159265 ... and so on.

The protagonist in all the short stories is a nerdy math teacher. He is very clumsy when it comes to women, and he has realized that he will never reach to the level of his heroes, the great matematicians like Gauss, Cauchy, Leibniz and Emmy Noether.

Does that sound like a good idea for some short stories? I don't know. We'll see >:)

(I found the picture of Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) on the Internet. He's well known for the statistical distribution that carries his name (the Gauss curve). He also discovered the Gauss theorem in Calculus (the Russians call it the Gauss-Ostrogradsky theorem), and the method of Gauss elimination in linear algebra. Gauss is considered the last complete matematician, who mastered all the mathematical sub-diciplines of his time.)

Ghostwriter

I've been ghostwriting the last couple of days. No, I'm not talking about the Holy Ghost, though we're just through the Pentecost. I'm talking about science and technology.

I often make slides for my boss, technical stuff that she uses in various settings. This time, however, it was kind of a special event. Today the Prime Minister, the Mayor, and the CEO of the company came to visit our research center. I've never seen any of these people in real life before, only on TV.

Three months ago, we made a fairly big oil discovery in the Arctic (we found oil worth some 50 billion dollars with current prices). The Prime Minister, the Mayor and the CEO came to hear about the role of research and advanced geophysics in this discovery. My boss had 13 minutes to tell the story (the time schedule was planned minute by minute).

My own contribution was, by all means, very modest. I was just involved in parts of the geophysical work. I made my four slides, as usual. But this time I did more than that, because I wanted to create a good story. So, I wrote down, in detail, a proposed wording (a monologue) to use when presenting each slide.

As I was doing this, I realized that, what the Hell, this is just like writing a short story or a novel. I need a good hook to start with, then build up the excitement before the grand finale (unfortunately they already new the happy ending). I also put in a teaser pointing to on-going and future work, like writing for a series. It was great fun to write, actually.

I did of course, tell my boss, that this is just my proposal, the way I would have presented it. Use it if you want to, pick pieces of it if you like.

(The picture above has nothing whatsoever to do with the oil discovery mentioned above. I picked it from my archive of past projects. It's a seismic image from the other side of the world, offshore South America, computed 7 years ago)