Why the World’s Best Mathematicians Are Hoarding Chalk
Great Big Story1 HN recommenders · 2019–2023
30.3M views · documentary · evergreen · Uploaded 2019-05-02
A short Great Big Story piece about Hagoromo, a Japanese chalk brand so prized that mathematicians stockpiled it, with some reportedly dealing it on the side. It tells the quirky tale of a writing tool whose supply became scarce.
Cited as an amusing side story whenever HN discusses blackboards, chalk, and how mathematicians work.
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5 comments from Hacker News
Ha, I remember seeing that post recently. Looks like it goes back to a 2015 gizmodo article, and was in a recent youtube clip. [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]
Recently saw a good video about this: [VIDEO] Pretty amusing they were stockpiling it and some were chalk dealers on the side.
Sounds like crummy chalk -- a good blackboard with some chalk is heaven for me. Whiteboards are so sterile. [VIDEO]
I can remember rolling my eyes at a writer using a mechanical typewriter decades after word processors had taken over. Did they thaw out of a glacier? At the same time I love physical media. As a math professor I defend a widespread preference for blackboards over soul-sucking whiteboards, imagining that musicians will still play grand pianos in a century, and they'll still snicker over Ryan Gosling playing a toy piano under the spotlight in that classic movie "La La Land". I've hoarded Hagoromo chalk; I'm the one with the chalk attaché case in [1]. I've always carried multiple grades of drawing paper, and I've worked through many hundreds of artist grade felt tip pens, scanning all my math notes for thirty years. Then, pandemic. Just as World War 2 accelerated women in the workplace, the pandemic has accelerated the uptake of digital tools for visual presentation. To teach over Zoom, we needed to embrace drawing on a tablet. I understand that the pandemic radically accelerated similar trends in architecture. The algorithmic possibilities of drawing on a tablet are truly addictive; returning to paper feels like returning to a mechanical typewriter. For my purposes, Concepts offers the most involving algorithmic experience; I wrote [2] to support my note taking and diagrams for papers. However, Notability offers the least friction. I can have the same psychological relationship to taking notes on my tablet as I had with phyical paper, with the benefits of algorithmic reuse. (P
> If I'm ever in charge, I'm buying chalkboards. You gotta be sure to get the super special chalk mathematicians are hoarding, too: [VIDEO]