Favorites page for Julian Fleron
I think that everybody's favorites are fickle things. For me it is certainly true. If I don't have a new favorite CD or book about every two weeks then I am in a rut. Send me some suggestions!
On the other hand, those listed below are really quite lasting.
Favorite People
Lots of people that I have thanked elsewhere.
I was thinking of what people call ``heroes''. Only there is a caveat, I don't really have heroes in the typical sense, we're all too imperfect. But here's people I'd like to have a beer with.
Barack Obama
Morris Dees
Ice-T
Lance Armstrong
Pete Seeger
Muhammad Ali
Jonathan Kozol wasn't included above as he came to my house for a beer and played with my kids prior to serving as WSC's Commencement Speaker.
Ed Emberley wasn't included as we got to eat bagels with him at the Eric Carle Museum.
Of course, there are dead people that would be on the list if they were still with us, certainly including my Grandfather Brownie, Martin Luther King, jr., Carl Sagan, Georg Cantor and John Steinbeck.
Favorite Books
Fiction
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Miracle of Catfish by Larry Brown
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Mathematical Fiction
Factoring Humanity by Robert J. Sawyer
Contact by Carl Sagan
Proof by David Auburn
Non-Fiction
Words I Wish I Wrote by Robert Fulgham
Make a World by Ed Emberley
The Slate Roof Bible by Joseph Jenkins
Full Catastrophe Living by John Kabat-Zinn
Exuberance: The Passion for Life by Kay Redfield Jamison
Teaching and Education
Proofs and Refutations by Imre Lakatos
Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Postman and Weingartner
Teaching with Your Mouth Shut by Donald Finkel
Nobody Left to Hate by Elliot Aronson
Mindstorms by Seymour Papert
Mathematics
Journey Through Genius by William Dunham
The Book of Numbers by John H. Conway and Richard Guy
A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form by Pual Lockhart
For Kids
Make a World by Ed Emberley
The Math Curse by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith
Favorite Music
Woody Guthrie, Steve Earle, Ani DiFranco, the Avett Brothers, Gillian Welch, Lyle Lovett, Billy Bragg, Tracy Chapman, Indigo Girls, Traffic,
Ice-T, Rage Against the Machine, K'Naan, Outkast, Mos Def, Eminem, Prince,
Bob Dylan, John Mellencamp, Sinead O'Connor, Brandi Carlile, Dave Matthews Band
AC-DC, Heart (oldschool), Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd,
The Pogues, White Stripes,
The Chieftains, the Weavers,
Favorite Movies
Thief
Thelma and Louise
Momento
Paperclips
Glory
Favorite Organizations
Southern Poverty Law Center
Favorite Amazing Things
Inauguration - Bearing witness at the Inauguration of Barack H. Obama 
as the 44th President of the United States with my family.
I Have Landed, 9/11/1901 - The famed biologist Stephen Jay Gould's American lineage began on September 11, 1901 when his Papa Joe landed at Ellis Island.
On September 11, 2001 Gould was on an airplane en route to Ellis Island, with a copy of the English grammar book of Papa Joe's that was inscribed ``I have landed, Sept. 11th 1901",
when the attacks began. His interpretation of this ``epochal moment'' on his view of humanity and natural history is included in five short sections in the book I Have Landed.
(These sections are entitled ``I have landed'', ``The good people of Halifax'', ``Apple Brown Betty'', ``The Woolworth building'', and ``September 11, '01''.)
These short essays are not only the most powerfully written that I know of this event, but some of the most insightful essays I have ever read.
Honeybee Waggle Dance - Mathematician Barbara Shipman realized after years of work on six-dimensional flag manifolds (arising at the intersection of mathematics and quantum physics)
that schematic diagrams she used to understand quantum interactions were the same that her father had taught her as a child to describe the Waggle Dance that
honeybees use to communicate. The discovery of the latter, by von Frisch, resulted in a Nobel prize. The implications of the former are still unknown, but to me
are one of the great illustrations of serendipity in learning that I know. For more see Quantum Bees.
Flexagons and Quantum Physics - As graduate students famous physicist Richard Feynman and three buddies (who also became fairly well-known) invented Flexagons, small origami-like paper sculptures like the
``Cootie-catchers'' many of us made in elementary school. In trying to analyze the symmetries the group developed schematic diagrams to represent the ``Tuckerman traverse'' which explained these symmetries.
These diagrams provided the genesis for Feynman's later invention of what have become known as Feynman diagrams - which are part of what Feynman was later awarded a Nobel prize for!
jfleron@wsc.ma.edu
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