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This spring, an 80-year-old Japanese chalk company went out of business. Nobody, perhaps, was as sad to see the company go as mathematicians who had become obsessed with Hagoromo Fulltouch Chalk, the so-called "Rolls Royce of chalk."
With whiteboards and now computers taking over classrooms, the company's demise seemed to mark the end of an era.
Being neither a mathematician nor a chalk artist, I heard about Hagoromo through my friend Dan, a mathematician finishing up his Ph.D. at Stanford. He recently appeared on a Japanese TV special about the demise of Hagoromo Bungu Co., where a TV crew came out to Stanford to interview mathematicians about the legendary chalk. One professor described hoarding enough of the stuff to keep him in chalk for the next 15 years. Dan is in the special too, calling the end of Hagoromo "a tragedy for mathematics."
Okay, he was obviously joking. But it is true that mathematicians are fanatics for this obscure Japanese chalk. Here you can see a long discussion online where mathematicians are hunting for Hagoromo chalk suppliers in the U.S. Satyan Devadoss, a Williams College math professor, even wrote a blog post calling it "dream chalk." He explained:
There have been rumors about a dream chalk, a chalk so powerful that mathematics practically writes itself; a chalk so amazing that no incorrect proof can be written using this chalk. I can finally say, after months of pursuit, that such a chalk indeed exists.
Similar reactions have been noted in the past from artists about the demise of Pearl Paints, or from photographers about Polaroid film. Any mathematicians care to weigh in?
[Editor's note: Here is a story link for those clamoring for one.. :) ]
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Thursday June 18 2015, @05:13PM
But Polaroid is still a somewhat unique experience. You take a photo and soon after you are holding an actual physical artifact in your hand. Not just an image on a screen. That could be kind of powerful in a world that is going mostly digital and should not be underestimated.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Thursday June 18 2015, @05:21PM
Well, yes. I'm not a photographer. I have never fetishized photographs. I truly do not get the idolization of Cindy Sherman. I just don't get it. But when people who do obsess about Polaroids, I know enough to know that it's a thing. Especially when you learn that fans have gone so far as to restart production of a form of image capture that by all rights ought to be well and truly dead, then you ought to acknowledge that there's something there, even if you yourself don't get it.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DutchUncle on Thursday June 18 2015, @08:03PM
Why ought it to be well and truly dead? I come to the question from the other side; when I was a kid, there was no instant photography and no consumer video. You took your pictures through a viewfinder, and hoped that the film had captured what you saw, and that the film didn't get damaged before you got it developed. (Of course, that meant a whole industry of both local and mail-order film developers and printers that has since vanished; but I digress.) The one exception was a Polaroid. You knew, right away, that you had captured a memento of a special event or special gathering that might never happen again. And for a child, watching that image appear was magic and science and engineering all woven together.
If you're used to "taking a picture" being capturing an image that you ALREADY SAW on your screen, and you can display it at full resolution instantly, and you have complete control over adjusting and modifying and printing it . . . . well, then, yes, I can imagine that you don't get it, because you don't have that contrast to have made it special.