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Publisher:
2023 2021 Q4 Q3
& DOUGLAS COUNTY
Lawrence Business Magazine, LLC Ann Frame Hertzog & Steven Hertzog Editor-in-Chief:
Ann Frame Hertzog
LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHERS
Chief Photographer:
What is the impact of Math? To start with, mathematics is a cornerstone of human understanding, permeating every facet of our lives. Its importance reverberates through engineering, art, economics, architecture, agriculture, aviation, and education, serving as a universal language that transcends boundaries and disciplines.
Steven Hertzog Featured Writers:
In education, math is more than numbers and equations; it cultivates critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and logical reasoning. It acts as a scaffold, supporting the comprehension of various subjects, from science to geography and history. Art, seemingly boundless in its creative expression, has an unexpected symbiosis with mathematics. From the symmetry in ancient architecture to the intricacies of modern digital art, math underpins artistic creation. The Fibonacci sequence, golden ratio, and fractals serve as mathematical concepts that artists use to create visually appealing compositions. Whether in painting, music, photography, sculpture or Stan Herd’s earthworks, math provides structure and harmony, enhancing the artistic experience. In the realm of business, mathematics is the bedrock of decision-making. Analyzing market trends, risk assessment, financial projections, and optimizing strategies heavily rely on mathematical models. Moreover, the rise of data-driven decision-making in the business world underscores the pivotal role of math in interpreting and leveraging large datasets for strategic advantage. Mathematics is indispensable in numerous careers, from engineering and technology to healthcare and finance. Engineers employ mathematical principles to design structures, develop technologies, and solve complex problems. Medical professionals use mathematical models to understand biological processes, predict disease progression, and optimize treatment plans. Even fields seemingly distant from math, such as journalism and humanities, benefit from data analysis and statistical reasoning to present accurate information and uncover societal trends. The presence of math throughout so many facets of our lives underscores its significance in fostering innovation and progress. It is the backbone of technological advancements, enabling artificial intelligence, cryptography, and quantum computing breakthroughs. In reading this issue, we hope you get to see how math impacts our lives in ways you may not have thought of before or appreciate its impact in a new light. Please note that all of our advertisers have a stake in the local economy; we ask you to first consider them before looking to source your needs outside of the community. Try and shop locally as much as possible and avoid the urge to order online. If you find something online – see if one of our local businesses has it. We know they would appreciate the business - our local businesses are at the center of our community. When we Shop Local - Shop Baldwin, Eudora, Lecompton, and Lawrence (and use Local Services) - we are supporting those businesses, giving back to our community, and building a future together. Sincerely,
Ann Frame Hertzog Editor-in-Chief/Publisher
Steven Hertzog Chief Photographer/Publisher
www.LawrenceBusinessMagazine.com
ON THE COVER (clockwise from left): Greg Rudnick, Katie Hoke, Donna Ginther, Paul Werner, Stan Herd, Purnaprajna Bangere, Bozenna Pasik-Duncan Photo by Steven Hertzog
Bob Luder Patricia A. Michaelis, Ph.D. Emily Mulligan Nick Spacek Tara Trenary Darin M. White Copy Editor:
Tara Trenary Contributing Writers:
Autumn Bishop Contributing Photographers:
Katie Brown Jeff Burkhead Marc Havenar
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LawrenceBusinessMagazine.com Lawrence Business Magazine, LLC 3514 Clinton Parkway, Suite A-113 Lawrence, KS 66047 © 2023 Lawrence Business Magazine, LLC Lawrence Business Magazine, is published quarterly by Lawrence Business Magazine, LLC and is distributed by direct mail to businesses in the Lawrence & Douglas County Community. It is also distributed at key retail locations throughout the area and mailed to individual subscribers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reprinted or reproduced without the publisher’s permission. Lawrence Business Magazine, LLC assumes no responsibility for unsolicited materials. Statements and opinions printed in the Lawrence Business Magazine are the those of the author or advertiser and are not necessarily the opinion of Lawrence Business Magazine.
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CONTENTS Features: 08 Lawrence in Perspective: Mapping the Big Land Grab by Patricia Michaelis, Ph.D.
16 Math on the Fly by Bob Luder
24 The Art of Mathematics by Darin White
34 A Lesson That Counts by Emily Mulligan
40 Changing the Scoreboard by Nick Spacek
46 Making it Count -
Reaping What They Sow by Anne Brockhoff
56 Go Figure - A Math Affair by Bob Luder
64 Recipe for Success by Tara Trenary
72 One Move at a Time by Nick Spacek
Departments: 5 12 76 76 82
Letter From the Publishers LMH Health: Break into the Health-Care Industry Local Scene Newsmakers What or Where?
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LAWRENCE & DOUGLAS CO [ IN PERSPECTIVE ]
Surveys of the public lands in Kansas and Nebraska Territories made it possible for settlers to claim land and establish legal title to it. Today, rural areas still use range, township, section and section subdivisions to describe property. Perhaps if you grew up on a farm, you heard phrases such as “the lower 40” or “the west 40,” referring to the 40-acre quadrants of a section. The massive mapping effort of the Public Land Survey System was one of the most important factors in making it possible for people to settle in Kansas.
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Mapping the Big Land Grab The Public Land Survey System was the U.S.’s solution to surveying and distributing land to settlers despite it having already been claimed by indigenous people. by Pat Michaelis, Ph.D., Historical Research & Archival Consulting map provided by Kansas Memory, kansasmemory.org
Many of us recall learning about the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States at that time, in high school history class. The United States purchased 530,000,000 acres of territory in 1803 for $15 million from France. Once the U.S. had acquired this vast, funnel-shaped area from the middle Canadian border, across the Great Plains and narrowing into the Mississippi River Delta, it had to figure out how to make it available to settlers. The solution was the Public Land Survey System (PLSS), which established a grid of townships, ranges and sections to create legal descriptions for specific parcels of land. The statement that the U.S. purchased this land from France ignores the fact that much of the land was claimed by Native American tribes. Debates about the idea of indigenous lands rights resulted in numerous court cases lasting into the 1930s. The Indian Claims Commission was established in 1946 to determine historical damages for the loss of tribal land. The damages were estimated at over $800 million, 20 times what the U.S. had paid France in 1803. Thomas Jefferson wanted to use the land acquired through the Louisiana Purchase to distribute to Revolutionary War soldiers and to raise money for the U.S. by selling it. To prepare for this distribution, the land had to be surveyed. On Aug. 26, 1854, the Commissioner of the General Land Office, John Wilson, provided instructions to John Calhoun, who had been appointed Surveyor General of Kansas and Nebraska. The first priority was to survey and mark the border between Kansas and Nebraska territories. Wilson wrote to Calhoun: For reasons of expediency, because of the apprehension of hostile interruptions from the Indians, it is not deemed proper and prudent to survey a base line further to the west than one hundred and eight miles distant from the Missouri River, at the precise point where it is intersected by the 40th parallel of north latitude. 9
Calhoun, born in 1806 in Boston, moved to Springfield, Illinois, where he became a surveyor. He was a Democrat and supported Stephen A. Douglas, who proposed popular sovereignty that called for the residents of a territory to vote on whether to allow slavery in their proposed state. Douglas used his influence with U.S. Pres. Franklin Pierce to have Calhoun appointed Surveyor General of Kansas and Nebraska. He participated in the Lecompton Constitutional Convention in 1857 and was considered a moderated proslavery supporter because he supported a vote on the issue. The contract for establishing the baseline between the Kansas and Nebraska territories was awarded to U.S. Deputy Surveyor John P. Johnson. He was not an experienced surveyor but began working to establish the baseline on Nov. 16, 1854, and finished 20 days later on Dec. 5. At the same time, Charles Manners and Joseph Ledlie were preparing to begin surveying in the territories. Manners was assigned Nebraska, and Ledlie was awarded a contract for Kansas. Manners was to procure a cast-iron monument from St. Joseph, Missouri, and place it at the east end of the baseline on the western bluff of the Missouri River. This monument weighed approximately 600 pounds and was transported by canoe from St. Joseph and set by Charles Manners on May 8, 1855. Meanwhile, Ledlie realized the corner that Johnson set at the First Guide Meridian East was located incorrectly. They both returned to Leavenworth hoping to get instructions from Calhoun. On May 30, 1855, Ledlie wrote his brother to update him on his work. I came out to this country prepared to execute such contract, or contracts for surveying as I might be able to obtain from the Surveyor General. I have now in my employ ten men; two teams of mules and all necessary equipment for a regular camp siege. Mr. Charles A. Manners, late surveyor of Christian County, Ill., with a like number of hands is associated with me in the enterprise. Both Ledlie and Manners found errors in Johnson’s work. Again, Ledlie wrote his brother about this problem. I arrived at my place of destination on the evening of the 8th. On the night of the 9th made the necessary observation of the Polar Star when on the eastern meridian and again when at its greatest eastern elongation thereby establishing very satisfactory a true meridian. I now felt pretty well contented and felt strongly in hopes I could be able to proceed next morning. The next morning I tested the baseline by the meridian thus found; and to my horror and astonishment found the base line wrong. … finally I concluded to start east on the line and meet Mr. M. I left my men in the camp (except one) and taking one of my lightest wagons I proceeded on east, and on the evening of the 13th met Mr. M 33½ miles from my camp; he was encamped on the waters of the Nemaha. … That night I established a true meridian at his camp with my transit instrument and the next day compared it with Mr. M.’s solar compass, and found to agree to a hair. Ledlie and Manners decided they needed to report these problems to Calhoun, but he had already returned to Springfield, Illinois. The primary way of communicating with people in the east was via the telegraph. Calhoun did not respond to the first telegram the surveyors sent. Eventually, Calhoun responded that he was at home, and Ledlie sent him another message. It was unsuccessful because, “the next day, the lightning took possession of the wires, and we have not been able to obtain any answer to your dispatch as yet. On yesterday morning, we dispatched a special messenger to Springfield fearing that the wires would not be relied upon.” The deputy surveyors were paid by the mile for surveying completed at the rate of $12. They created field notes to document their measurements. These were submitted to the Surveyor Generals office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The employees staff included a chief clerk, a chief draftsman, draftsmen, copyists, clerks, accountant and messengers. Estimated expenses for this office of 1857 totaled $19,400. The surveyor general’s salary was $2,000, and six clerks, paid varying salaries, received a total of $7,400. The cost of transcribing field notes was estimated at $4,000 with another $6,600 for office rent, stationery and contingencies. Surveyors were paid by the contract with amounts ranging from approximately $500 to $700. Plat maps from the work creating the Public Land Survey System were created by draftsmen using the field notes of the surveyors. They are close to “works of art” given the information with which the mapmakers had to work. The key to the maps follows: Green outline of banks and riparian areas around the streams, rivers were drawn in blue, squares with squiggly lines across them are cultivated lands, roads and trails consisted of two parallel lines, and the exact acreage of each section is shown. The map show is for a plat for Township 12 S, Range 19 E which ultimately contained part of Lawrence. p 10
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Great Team, Great Results for Knee Replacement Patient by Autumn Bishop, LMH Health, photos courtesy LMH Health
For more than 45 years, Scot Hoffman has been in love with running. One of his favorite things to do is to get up in the morning and run as far as he can. That has led Hoffman to compete in races from 5Ks to marathons, but the distance he’s most comfortable with is the half marathon.
Based on his symptoms and imaging results, Hoffman was a candidate for total knee replacement. He opted for surgery on the knee which was the most troublesome first, checking in at the LMH Health Main Campus in January 2023.
“The half is my specialty,” he said. “The Hospital Hill Run in Kansas City each spring was my favorite and I’ve done seven or eight of those. My wife, Donna, and I would take my kids to stay at Crown Center and I’d get up the next morning for the race. We’d do lots of races together.”
“The MAKO system can be more precise than traditional surgical techniques because it can create a 3-D model of each patient’s joint,” he said. “Using the system, physicians create a personalized surgical plan. The robotic arm allows surgeons to work within the parameters created and use it to assist in placing new joints. Our patients receive the advanced care they deserve with the use of this technology.”
All of the training miles that Hoffman put in – up to 40 or 50 a week – wore on his knees and “beat them to a pulp,” so it wasn’t a surprise when the pain began. He’d put up with the pain for several years before turning to orthopedic surgeon Adam Goodyear, MD, and the team at OrthoKansas for help. “Scot was having a lot of pain and had a lack of mobility,” Dr. Goodyear explained. “It was clearly affecting his activities of daily living and his quality of life.” 12
Dr. Goodyear used the MAKO robotic arm to perform the surgery. The MAKO has been proven to facilitate a shorter hospital stay, typically less pain and quicker return to function.
The surgery went smoothly and Hoffman was discharged from the hospital later that same day. He was amazed by the experience. “Everyone had told me the horrors of knee surgery and I’d continued to put it off because I was afraid of the recovery time,” he explained. “I went in, got it done, woke up in recovery and never looked back.”
HEADING TO THERAPY Hoffman was up and walking within a couple hours of surgery and shared that Donna was an incredible help. He didn’t experience much pain due to the knee replacement, only taking Advil for pain after a few days. “I thought, ‘What’s the big fuss?’ I’ve had a headache that hurt more,” he quipped. Every patient is different, with many using a walker for about two weeks after a total knee replacement. Dr. Goodyear said that Hoffman progressed very well and quickly, allowing him to get rid of the walker soon after his surgery. He then began eight weeks of physical therapy with Tyrel Reed, DPT, a physical therapist at the LMH Health West Campus. Reed said that while Hoffman had difficulty bending his knee at first, he progressed quickly. “There’s a huge mental and physical commitment to surgery and therapy,” Reed explained. “Scot understood that we were in this together. He was super positive and extremely consistent with his home exercises and that allowed him to progress smoothly.”
THE OTHER SIDE A few short weeks after completing physical therapy for the first knee, it was time for Hoffman to have his other knee replaced. He checked in at the Lawrence Surgery Center, located at the LMH Health West Campus, for the operation. “The West Campus was superb and I got great care there,” Hoffman said. “I had a great experience and went home the same day. There was a little more pain but it wasn’t anything that bothered me or kept me up at night. Dr. Goodyear had told me that no two knee replacements are the same.” Hoffman returned to physical therapy with Reed. Within the first week, he was moving around without a cane, heading up the driveway and going for a quarter mile walk. Prior to surgery, Dr. Goodyear talked with Hoffman and asked about his goals and expectations following the procedures. He wanted to get back to biking, walking at a fast pace for a few miles or even progress to a slow jog. Those were goals that Dr. Goodyear could get behind, though he made sure that he set the right expectations. “I tell folks that I don’t put a ton of restrictions on them after surgery, but it’s important to realize that high-impact activities like a lot of jumping or long-distance running could cause the knee replacement to wear out sooner,” Dr. Goodyear said. “Similar to tread on a tire, the more miles or harder the miles, the quicker you may need new tires.”
GREAT TEAM, GREAT RESULTS Patients turn to the team at LMH Health OrthoKansas for expert care that’s not only exceptional for a community hospital – it’s among the best anywhere. The clinicians and staff provide convenient, collaborative and innovative care all under one roof, providing the ability to get treatment close to where patients work, live and play. “Our total joint program has received advanced certification for total hip and knee replacement from The Joint Commission, the regulatory body that accredits healthcare organizations in the United States,” Dr. Goodyear said. “It’s a very rigorous process, one that we’re also going through for total shoulder replacement. Patients can be assured that they’ll get the very best care in the region at OrthoKansas.” Hoffman couldn’t be more pleased with the results of his knee replacements. Before surgery, he wasn’t able to move without pain and his quality of life had decreased. Now he’s running shorter distances at a slower pace and enjoying the scenery.
Top to Bottom: Scot Hoffman, Dr. Adam Goodyear and Tyrel Reed DPT
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“Every time I came out of physical therapy, I walked a little faster, a little straighter. I’ve been able to do things I hadn’t been able to for 15 years,” he said. “The quality of service, from the nurses to the anesthesiologists and doctor, I didn’t have one complaint. I’m so fortunate to have the team at OrthoKansas by my side.” p
Clancey Maloney, chair of the Airport Advisory Board
Math on the Fly Aviation experts use mathematics in nearly everything they do, whether it’s flying a plane or helicopter, working in air traffic control, measuring fuel use and determining wind speeds, or flight planning for emergency services. by Bob Luder, photos by Steven Hertzog
Clancey Maloney recalls flying her airplane from New Mexico to Missouri several years back when she received a sudden call over the radio from air traffic control. There was a squadron of aircraft flying in her vicinity and at her altitude of 11,000 feet. She was asked to immediately descend to 10,000 feet to remain at a safe distance and continue her flight unimpeded. “It turned out to be the Canadian demonstration team flying home,” Maloney says. “The Snowbirds, they called them. 16
They released smoke to show me they were there. It really was an impressive sight.” As a pilot that day, Maloney was required to make a simple mathematical calculation: 11,000 minus X equals 10,000, which told her she needed to descend 1,000 feet to safely avoid the Canadian aircraft. But it focuses on a much larger point when it comes to aeronautics and aviation. “It’s all applied math and science,” says Maloney, who’s been piloting aircraft for more than 40 years. “Charts and graphs … you have to know how to read. You have to be able to understand rates of descent and altitudes. You use trigonometry to understand vectors and vector analysis. You have to be able to figure how far you can fly on the amount of fuel in the tank. “Math plays a role in just about everything you do,” she explains.
Eurotec VFS Avionics Lab – Fabrication of Custom Wiring Harnesses and Inspection to Interconnect Drawing Requirements
That rings true in just about every aspect of aviation and aeronautics, whether it’s a private pilot flying charters with her own plane, such as Maloney, or companies that operate locally, regionally, nationally or even globally in the field. Hetrick Air Services operates a flight school, sells and rents aircraft, performs aircraft maintenance and leases hangar space out at the Lawrence Regional Airport. EuroTec Vertical Flight Solutions performs maintenance on helicopters, helicopter engines and airframes, as well as engineering new cutting-edge engine and battery technology. Life Flight also flies in and out of the Lawrence airport. They all operate in the aeronautical realm, and they all apply principles of mathematics in a majority of day-to-day operations. Even air traffic control— Lawrence doesn’t have a tower so must rely on operations in Kansas City, Olathe and St. Louis—uses math in just about every decision made. “I probably don’t go more than an hour every day without doing some sort of math problem,” says Aaron Kuehl, engineering director at EuroTec. “Geometry, trigonometry … math relationships are involved in most everything we do.”
ROCKING IT OLD SCHOOL Maloney is a third-generation pilot who, despite not starting until she was in her 30s, has been flying for more than 40 years. In fact, back in 1943, her mother was one of the first women to fly solo out of the Kansas City downtown airport. Her grandfather purchased and flew an NC-2620, a WWI surplus Jenny, in the 1920s in Grundy County, Missouri. “There’s still only about 6 to 7 percent of women pilots working today,” she says. As a longtime veteran flyer, she’s seen the changes in aviation technology. “You used to have physical maps and stopwatches,” she says. “Now you can see the world on your iPad. You have to know the technology.” Rest assured; Maloney knows the latest piloting expertise front to back. But she is the first to admit she’s also a bit old school. Even with the latest in-flight tech, the possibility always exists of system failure. She speaks of this as she pulls an old, what can only be described as a circular slide rule from her thick bag of flight materials. This can be used to calculate the amount of fuel she needs to make a specific trip.
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Hetrick Air services private planes in their hangars at The Lawrence Regional Airport
“My plane goes about 200 miles per hour,” she says. “It burns about 20 gallons of gas in an hour. If I need to know how much gas I have or how far I can go on a tank, I need to figure that on my slide rule. “Of course, we have electronics to tell us these things now, but I still carry it in case I lose electrical. I’m old school. I still take out charts and mark down landmarks and where I need to go.” Measuring fuel is just the beginning of how a pilot applies math principles in flight. While an air traffic control tower might tell a pilot how many degrees an aircraft needs to turn, geometry must be applied in knowing how sharp a 30-degree turn is. If there’s an object at the end of a runway, such as a tree, rates of ascent and/or descent must be calculated to avoid those obstacles. Math must be used when calculating the length and width of a runway, as well as the makeup of the runway surface, to determine whether an aircraft can land or take off safely. Pilots also must be able to calculate Greenwich Mean Time, which is the time primarily used in air traffic control. “As a pilot, it’s your responsibility to know everything about the aircraft and specifics of flights,” Maloney explains. 18
MATH AND MAINTENANCE Hetrick Air Services has been offering customers flight lessons, aircraft rental and sales, aircraft maintenance, hangar service and flight tours for 40 years in Lawrence (and 15 years before that in Topeka). And as Maloney mentioned, principles of mathematics have been applied in nearly everything the company does. “Pilots are always dealing with math,” says Hetrick Air Services President Lloyd Hetrick. “Especially when it comes to figuring weights and balances of aircraft. Of course, there are computer programs that do all that today.” Hetrick reiterated Maloney’s points as well about using math to gauge fuel usage, going a step further to point out his pilots and student pilots need to be able to not only figure fuel usage but adjust those calculations based on wind speeds, converting gas mileage based on headwinds, tailwinds and crosswinds. Equations like “weight times location” are used to help navigate moments when it’s needed to calculate fuel reserves. “Most of it is normal addition, subtraction and multiplication,” Hetrick says. “The more tools you have, the better you can be.” And speaking of tools, Hetrick says math also is used widely in the company’s machine shop to measure such factors as the proper torque to use when tightening nuts and bolts. There also is a piece of equipment called a “crow foot,” which is an extension to a nut that is necessary to mathematically convert to the right leverage when working with it.
Lloyd Hetrick, president Hetrick Air Services
Top to bottom: Airbus H135 Helicopter - Fenestron with Tail Rotor Assy being disassembled for inspection and repair.
MATH GONE VERTICAL When it comes to vertical flight in the Lawrence area, EuroTec Vertical Flight Solutions has provided the answers to its customers for nearly two decades. EuroTec is a helicopter and engine sales and leasing company that’s provided maintenance, repair and overhaul services for Airbus helicopters and components and Safran helicopter gas turbine engines for the last 20 years. A Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) repair contractor, EuroTec operates two hangars at Lawrence Regional Airport but also has a corporate headquarters in Eudora, a satellite operation in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and a business partner in Japan. It sells parts worldwide.
VFS by Eurotec Li-Ion Battery STC Kits for Airbus Light Helicopters.
And as Kuehl explains, he and his staff use math principles in much of what they do, especially when it comes to new product development, such as lithium-ion battery replacements that provide more power, weigh half as much and last twice as long. “When we’re doing custom fabrications, we’re doing drawings,” Kuehl says. “We start with basic hand stuff on a piece of paper to get started then use computer programs for structure evaluation, 3D modeling. We’re doing stuff related to modifications … rebuilding aircraft, mounting electronics. It all requires analysis. 20
Avionics Upgrade on Airbus H125 Helicopter – Verifying New Wiring Harness Installation and Interconnect to Existing Airframe Avionics.
“Every time I’m designing something, I have to measure things, look at existing structures, what they’re capable of holding,” he adds. Everything must be coordinated with the FAA to approve installations, Kuehl continues. All aircraft also have maintenance schedules that must be met. Big checks come at two, six and 12 years. At 12 years, aircraft must be completely taken apart and checked. “It’s all pretty math heavy,” he says.
VERTICAL FOR EMERGENCIES If a bad accident or medical emergency should happen in a remote area far away from a medical facility, you’ll be happy to know that Life Star of Kansas Air Medical Services has one of its three operating centers at Lawrence Regional Airport. The Lawrence Life Star location, known as Life Star 1 (Life Star 2 is in Junction City, while Health Star 1 is in Overland Park), operates out of a hangar and has full accommodations for crew in what is a 24/7/365-manned base. Life Star 1 contains one helicopter and four pilots who alternate seven days on, seven days off, 12 hours on, 12 hours off rotations. There’s one full-time mechanic along with a backup. It also employs three full-time nurses and three full-time paramedics, along with two part-time nurses. On average, Life Star 1 makes one to two calls to emergency scenes per day. Adrian Horne, base aviation manager, says his crew utilizes basic math principles beginning from the time an emergency call comes in to the time the helicopter returns to the hangar. “There’s much that goes into flight planning,” Horne says. “A call comes in, and we first have to determine whether we can take the flight. We have to determine the length of the flight, weight of the aircraft, weight of crew, weight of the patient … . It’s all weights and balances. “It’s the ratios it takes to get from point A to point B safely,” he adds. Weather—winds, temperatures, visibility—also are big factors in gauging a flight’s capabilities. During summer months, high temperatures affect an aircraft’s weights and how much can be carried safely. “We have charts on board to show what we should be pulling based on various temperatures, wind speeds and distances,” Horne explains. Flight headings mostly are plugged into a computer navigational system, but Horne says calculations must often be made for distance headings, especially when flying to especially remote areas. “I’ve been flying aircraft for quite a while,” he says. “Math is critical to what we do.”
Exterior and interior photos of Life Star emergency helicopters
CONTROLLING THE SKIES Brian Von Bevern served as an air traffic controller for 25 years, beginning in the early 1980s in Fort Worth, Texas, before moving to Olathe, which helps control air traffic in the Lawrence area. He’ll be the first to tell you that from the time he began focusing on radar screens at the beginning of a shift to quitting time, math was at the forefront of his thoughts. “Pretty much everything in aviation is math-oriented,” says Von Bevern, who today is retired but volunteers as public information officer for the Commemorative Air Force, Heart of America Wing, a nonprofit that preserves and honors veterans and aircraft that fought for America in previous wars. “Everything is numbers.” A simple example he gives involves many of the restored World War II planes he flies, which travel at a top speed of around 600 miles per hour (mph). Given there’s 60 minutes in an hour, it can be calculated that a speed of 60 mph is equivalent to traveling 1 mile per minute. Simple multiplication then shows that Von Bevern’s WWII planes, at 600 mph, can cover 10 miles per minute. “Proportions is how you’d encapsulate it,” he says. Von Bevern says numbers ran through his head during entire shifts as an air traffic controller. Figuring turn angles, speeds of aircraft, aircraft separation criteria—it all took constant calculations involving math. “It was done in my head on a constant basis,” he says. “I was constantly updating (calculations) on a real-time basis.” Von Bevern says there’s an FAA air traffic control academy in Oklahoma City where air traffic controllers spend three months learning all the math they need to know. They’re required to memorize mileages between landing and takeoff areas, as well as mileages between where flight patterns intersect. By the end of the academy, they can run a 45-minute computer program that keeps planes safe and clear of each other. “A lot of it comes down to an internal sense of timing,” he says. “That’s math. Starting a clock in your head. “The whole job is pretty much math … on the fly, so to speak,” Von Bevern says. p 22
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The Art of Mathema tics Mathematics
The intriguing marriage of the disciplines breaks through barriers of the norm and offers limitless possibilities for new connections. By Darin White, photos by Steven Hertzog & Marc Havenar
It has been said that high-level math is more similar to abstract art than science. This idea might be confusing to a layperson. “... art is largely benefitted by creativity, but that creativity isn’t limited to art. In the same way that once you know how to carve or paint, once you get the math basics under your belt, then you can do creative things with them,” says Paul Hurtado, University of Nevada-Reno associate math professor. In the 2022 “Science & Technology” article “Math as Art,” Michelle Werdann writes that math is often found in art, but many mathematicians feel the math itself is art, that the formulas are elegant and the graphs beautiful. So how is math more like art than science? How do creativity and new ideas play into the beauty of math? How do creatives harness math as one of their tools in their visionary approaches?
by Bob Luder, photos by Steven Hertzog
Barbara Kerr, Ph.D, a Williamson Family Distinguished Professor of Counseling Psychology and co-director of the Center for Creativity and Entrepreneurship Education at the University of Kansas (KU), as well as author, recommends a classic article based on a lecture by author and mathematician Paul Richard Halmos, who spends a good amount of time describing what 24
: A wheatfield next to cellist Susan Mayo’s central Kansas farm house is the canvas for Stan Herd and his crew to create Picasso’ Goat Skull and Rose Right top: The acre image on the ground is about the size of a football field. Mulchcompost, sand, straw, and grass-near Peabody, Ks Right bottom: The Grid is but a small part of the math involved in every earthwork
math isn’t before defining what it is. It’s as if trying to describe an elephant to someone who is seeing impaired, he explains, or how a visual artist spends time defining and drawing in the negative space of an object to understand and focus on the objective, realizing it’s all truly important to understanding and communication. According to his 1968 “American Scientist” article “Mathematics as a Creative Art,” Halmos states, “Mathematics is abstract thought, mathematics is pure logic, mathematics is creative art. All these statements are wrong, but they are all a little right, and they are all nearer the mark than ‘mathematics is numbers’ or ‘mathematics is geometric shapes.’ For the professional pure mathematician, mathematics is the logical dovetailing of a carefully selected sparse set of assumptions with their surprising conclusions via a conceptually elegant proof. Simplicity, intricacy and, above all, logical analysis are the hallmark of mathematics.” Some examples of formulas in action further clarify creativity in math, or mathematics in creative motion, including a programmed app or program user experience, the background being a complex arrangement of ones and zeros that don’t mean much to nonprofessionals. When an audience is viewing creative work, whether dance, music, visual art, film, mixed media or other expressions, it has only what it brings to that moment in life. For some, this might be a certain level of intellectual understanding, others lived experience, some limited contact, travel, trial and error. Based on that experience, each person will see these moments through his or her own proverbial lens. 25
The beauty of the design, physics and math of an engine under the hood of a car, the ways the woven patterns are calculated and organized in a rug, the statistics of a baseball game, the stock market analytics may only be interesting to those who care enough about that subject. The depth of a concept or backdrop may be lost to those who don’t naturally make these connections. Perhaps it’s what meets the eye, such as the beauty of fractals, or the ear, such as the sound wave patterns heard and visualized in sand made by certain frequencies. These may start to resonate in some and start creative conversations around the math that calculates our world.
THE HARMONY OF MATH & MUSIC Purnaprajna P. Bangere, professor of mathematics and music at KU’s Hall Center for the Humanities, has combined his two passions, math and music, into his work. He uses algebraic geometry to incorporate classical East Indian music with various Western styles, including jazz and blues. This new style of music has been a lifetime in the making from an idea he conceived as a child. Bangere followed in his father’s footsteps, also a mathematician and teacher, and his entire, very musical family. At a young age, he trained intensively in classical East Indian violin with some of the best teachers and musicians in the world in the Parur style of Indian classical music. He gives credence to his guru, Vid. Sri H.K Narasimha Murthy (af26
Purnaprajna Bangere, KU math professor and musician
fectionately HKN), from their shared hometown of Mysore, India: “HKN Murthy, one of the great teachers of the violin in south India and in his heyday, was an important accompanist. Without him, I do not know what would have happened.” As he was growing up studying Parur music, he also listened to Western classical music. He came to the United States to get his Ph.D. in mathematics at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts, and he was missing home. He was exposed to the blues and jazz, which really moved him. He remembers, “It has a certain character that lodges into you at a time of intense homesickness and self-doubts. So it did. But even outside of these great traditions have great structural beauty that is mesmerizing. In fact, blues and jazz, like microtones, play a critical role in the ‘Metaraga system.’” Bangere continues to practice and play the classical music of India while also exploring Western music, which inspires him. He believes, “America is THE place for music. American musical culture is a vast, all-enveloping, inclusive series of paradigms. Genres interact and give rise to new creative
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music like no other place in the world…. I owe much to my adopted country. Only in America this multidisciplinary work could have happened. The American audiences, in my experience, are some of the most open-minded I know. They have been deeply affectionate toward me. I am very grateful to them.”
defined their culture. As a progressive activist, Herd has embraced this community-driven art form to bring attention to a multitude of issues showcasing the environment, science, sustainable agriculture and the humanities, which all connect on a common theme regarding the ‘human condition’ in the world today.”
“The meta-geometric framework of mathematician Alexander Grothendieck is a perfect language to capture ideas in music,” Bangere continues. Joining this meta geometric framework uses a self-created Metaraga system on the music side. This system has its own grammar and accompanying syntax. It does not have an East or West sound, but a whole new sound somewhere in no-man’s-land that is created.
Herd has spoken about his earthwork at the TEDxPSU conference at Pennsylvanian State University. His talk was titled „I Made an Earthwork the Size of a New York City Block. Here’s How it Changed Me.”
The result opens new frontiers with exciting new sounds and structures that transcend known genres of music. The Purna Loka Ensemble, Bangere’s current focus, was formed as a collaboration with Grammy Award-winning violinist and director of Turtle Island String Quartet, David Balakrishnan. Joining Bangere and Balakrishnan to complete the ensemble are bass virtuoso Jeff Harshbarger and Amit Kavthekar on Tabla. Their first album, „Metaraga,“ was released on Jan. 17, 2020, according to the group’s website. The sound is inspired by other elements besides “math,” and the possibilities are seemingly limitless.
Stan Herd’s welcoming party from Jicheng-with city officials in Kunming-Yunnan Provence 2018
THE MOVEMENT OF EARTHWORKS What if the earth was your creative outlet? Land is the medium that well-known native Kansan and Lawrencian visual artist Stan Herd uses to produce his work. Herd is an activist and heavily involved in the community, promoting music, film and the arts in America’s heartland. He is one of the founders of “Prairie Renaissance” with filmmaker Kevin Willmott. According to his website, “Stan Herd’s action through activism and community involvement has helped define this new art form while embracing his love of the land and the first native peoples of the Americas, whose embrace of nature 28
Herd has created works all over the world, from our backdoor at the Dole Institute of Politics, in Lawrence, Kansas, to many locations around the U.S. and in other countries such as Australia, Brazil, China and Cuba. He is currently preparing to work on two Fibonacci earthwork constructions (possibly the most complex math-related projects in recent history), one in Oklahoma and one in Shanghai, China. Qatar is also a potential location. The project has been in concept for more than 10 years. His entire process is built on the simplicity of a grid-enlargement system, which is simple to describe but more challenging to realize. Herd reveals he utilizes a grid system, “... 1 inch equaling 10, 20 or 40 feet on the field. I set up a perfect grid with a surveying transit and mark the points with numbered flags to keep my place on the 160-acre canvas. Each flag corresponded to the number on the sketch.” When Herd was working on the project “Young Woman of China,” in the Yunnan Province, in China, he said, “The Chinese engineers wanted to help me create the original outline with GPS, but I told them that I needed to do it the old-fashioned way, with a grid and flags, so I could get a feel for the ‘scale’ as I saw it developing in front of me. The grid, like the Chief Satanta grid, was 1 inch equaled 40 feet on the side of the mountain, because the image would be flattened to the viewer from across the small valley to another viewing hill. I purposely elongated the design on the grid, making the squares 40 feet wide and 50 feet tall.” Sculptors have historically used these “sweet points” to create a foreshortened view that looks more accurate from the location of the viewer. Herd uses technology to calculate the best foreshortened view for his work from the most-viewed vantage point. He has used equations and mathematic portions such as the golden ratio, or golden rule, which form the basis for the Fibonacci sequence, a sequence in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones and is based on Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, was also known as Fibonacci. Fibonnaci numbers, as they are called on which the sequence is built, can be seen in history as early as 200 B.C. in India based on information provided by Wikipedia. Herd explains, “Math in the Fibonacci is called the ‘golden rule,’ as it is the closest thing in the universe to nature’s number. The Fibonacci is seen naturally in the pattern of many plants ... in a hurricane (weather patterns), in astronomical patterns of the universe.”
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“Light Machine 5” – This is a detail of the control panel, associated circuitry, and patch used to create “Blossoming Pitch”. This device is connected to an oscillographic display and synchronized kinetoscope which provides an interactive color image from sound.
He describes the concept of the Fibonacci earthwork as one that “would splay out around the world, following the trajectory and maybe affected by the curve of the earth ... trackable … traceable, markable and finally intersecting with the other design (like in the ocean) ... leaving a pattern connecting two disparate parts of the world.” He uses equations to figure out placement of his designs in air-traffic patterns. His interest—to change people through art—has not only challenged him but has changed him.
MATH, PHYSICS AND ART COLLIDE Joey Orr, Ph.D., is an author, editor and founding member of the idea collective John Q. As the Andrew W. Mellon Curator and director of Arts Research Integration at KU’s Spencer Museum of Art, he serves as affiliate faculty in museum studies and visual art. Part of his work is to respond to the University researchers and their ideas, and help facilitate resources which “... can include space, programmatic frameworks, knowledge, networks, collections, archives and other institutional competencies.” He explains, “I am responding to the University’s research community. In other words, the curator becomes an access point for researchers and other audiences to author their own questions using the resources of the museum. Those resources can include space, programmatic frameworks, knowledge, networks, collections, archives and other institutional competencies.” Orr co-authored, “How To Do Things With SVD: Mathematical Tool-Sharing From Physics to Reformative Research,” a two-year cross-culture collaboration of CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Spencer Museum titled “Collective Entanglements.” The research and work was finalized in a six-channel sound and video installation co-created by 30
artist Janet Biggs, mathematician Agnieszka Miedlar and physicist Daniel Tapia Takaki, and curated by Orr. The introduction to the research is an interesting conversation about how collaboration and communication through individuals with drastically different practices could find creative ways of working together. “In the physical sciences, entanglement refers to sets of data that cannot be described independently of one another. In a more general sense, it refers to a complicated relationship or complex situation. It can be very useful in describing interdisciplinary inquiry, as well,” the research explains. This looks almost like a descriptor to the relationships between Purna Bangere’s Purna Loka Ensemble, which created a series of definitions to be able to communicate and translate between the math to create the sounds. The “Collective Entanglements” group traveled to CERN, which, according to its website, is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest and most-respected centers for scientific research. Orr says, “... the group used mathematical analytic tools to glean information from the experiments at CERN to compose the video used in the installation.”
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Traditionally trained visual artist Tim Forcade has been working with art and technology since the 1960s. “Seems to me math is implicit and imbedded in what most all of us do, artists included of course. The only difference between those of us using nontraditional media versus those using conventional is that the math is more visible in the former,” he says. “And that is mostly due to the fact that these new media are not fully formed enough to insulate the artist from their technical side.” He says he uses math the same way he’s used brush and canvas: “I begin and interact until I discover a suitable answer to an unspoken but known premise. Math is simply another starting point without implicit truth. It’s just another way to make a mark,” Forcade explains. He has had the opportunity to work with everything from analog electronics to contemporary computational media and on the development of various graphics programs and plug-ins. If you were to distill Forcade’s decades and decades of work down to a common essence, a singular focus, it is a passion and search for light. “I am utterly fascinated. I adore it. I recognize its origin, what it has passed through, reflected from—its experience—and for that, I am the moth,” his artist statement reads. He started his work as a painter but realized the core of what he was looking for could not be captured with this medium. Forcade’s search for light led to new processes and tools, such as “projectors, electronics, various motorized devices and, of course, photography, all in an effort to create evermore multilayered experiences of it.”
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Tim Forcade standing in front of “Practicing Chaos”. This 96” x 120” image was created using 3D geometry to construct an impossible object, one that would be impractical or impossible to create in the physical world. “Regarding Fluidity 2” – Tim creates all his images in a virtual studio using 2D and 3D software. This frees them from the limits of physicality. “Blossoming Pitch” is a 39" x 73" pigment print on canvas. It is a fraction-of-a-second view of a continuously changing visualization of sound in light. It is one of a series of compositions he created using an electronic synthesizer and display system I first designed and built in the mid-70’s.
“Mathematics and technology have always played a part both directly (calculating RC time constants for circuitry) and incidentally (keying in floating point values to modify 3D material properties) in my artwork,” he explains. “I regularly use tools like simple translation functions (rotation, position and scaling) and more complex operations like plugging PBR (physics-based rendering) shader modules together to make virtual glass. It is the core contributor in creating the rich and marvelous computational media many of us employ. And given all these years of work, it seems embedded in my DNA. Even so, I would argue that math is in no way a stand-in for my artwork anymore than oil paint could be for a traditional painter ….” In Forcade’s search for the essence of light, he pressed through a number of limitations in photography and created still lifes in the studio to create large light abstractions. These images were about seeing the “properties of light” rather than the objects themselves. In his never-ending quest, with past work in 2D and 3D programs, and his exploration with technology, he combined all of these elements together to delve into 3D computer graphics. He believes, “This is beyond painting or photography. It is a direct encounter with light’s essence.” The diversity of these unique individuals and collaborators, and their approach to complex ideas is fascinating and beautiful. With the use of calculations, graphs, concepts, translations, expressions, new definitions and math-based tools, it’s exciting to see how these ideas can extend beyond the borders of what many people consider math and inspiring to see the almost limitless possibilities. p 32
Donna Ginther, Distinguished Professor of Economics presents her public inaugural lecture “Turning the Research Lens on Ourselves: What do we know about Pay, Promotion, and Grants in the Academy?”
A Lesson That Tha t Coun ts Counts
KU professors explain math is not just a bunch of numbers but a language used to communicate using logic and critical thinking. by Emily Mulligan, photos by Steven Hertzog
What is math? Math is complicated. Math is equations. Math is a set of consistent rules. Math is an idea. Math is a scary monster that teachers harbor in their classrooms to torture students. 34
Bozenna Pasik-Duncan, KU Professor of Mathematics
We all have our own perceptions of math through our experiences and through what society has taught us about it. Fractions and basic operations like subtraction and multiplication show up in our daily lives, but what does more advanced, higher math even involve? And why does it exist? Three professors from the University of Kansas (KU) simplify higher math and explain its purpose in their specialties. It turns out that higher math looks intricate and foreign, but often, its uses are right in front of us.
THE HIGHEST LEVELS OF MATH In short, regardless of which subject or discipline employs math, it is employed to explain things. Which types of things depend on the subject or topic someone is studying. “Math is a language, and it’s a way to communicate an idea using a few symbols,” says Donna Ginther, the Roy A. Roberts & Regents Distinguished Professor of Economics at KU.
Using math to describe situations, questions and theories happens across the curriculum. Though there are many hard-and-fast rules in math, as we all know, the world is an ever-changing place where events don’t always occur the same way twice. We need math there to account for things that might change unexpectedly. “Mathematics is not about numbers. Mathematics is about logical and critical thinking,” says KU Professor of Mathematics Bozenna Pasik-Duncan. In a similar way to when a verbal disclaimer is applied to an agreement, math can function as a disclaimer to other factors that may affect a situation. And in fact, math can be the better method for describing what is occurring. “Words very rapidly hit their limits. At some level, you hit the wall that analogies can describe, and you have to go to the math,” says Gregory Rudnick, KU professor of physics and astronomy. So at the highest levels of math at a university, students, professors and researchers are using math to communicate ideas, questions and solutions with one another. Math can prove or refute ideas; it can enhance or reduce complicated situations; it can show, and it can tell. 35
Gregory Rudnick, KU Professor of Physics and Astronomy Greg at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii at 14,000 feet
HOW DOES MATH ESCALATE? Basic statistics that one might learn in high school math assume a level of control of the situation for which you are calculating the statistics, Pasik-Duncan explains. At that level, we do calculations for situations that we can see and get our arms around if we counted each data point or item: how many people answered the survey or the amount of each color of M&Ms in a bag. There might be some unknowns, such as some people who answered most but not all of the survey or the potential for the M&M packing machine to misfire and be inconsistent. But the equations we use assume a level of control so that we can learn how to calculate. Taking those statistical calculations to the next level introduces and incorporates the unknowns. “I believe in randomness; I don’t believe everything is deterministic. Measurements have errors, and equipment has some possible failures, so you have to take that into account. You cannot say exact every time—this is the randomness,” she continues. Math is necessary in astronomy for many of these same reasons of randomness and the unknown, plus other unique challenges. Rudnick says someone cannot actually directly measure the size of a star, for example. So to find out how big a star is and what its absolute brightness is, astronomers must measure the distance of the star and use angles and triangles to determine its size. 36
“Math is a way of optimizing things. It can be bare bones or super abstract,” he adds. “We revisit the same concepts in increasing depth by building on the algebra base with calculus; this lets us solve increasingly complicated problems.”
SPEAKING THE MATH LANGUAGE As when speaking any language, math in these disciplines and at this level can tell a story when it flows down a path or connects ideas. Those types of scenarios lead to inventions or advances in technology of materials, processes and programming. “Most people don’t think like an economist, and they’re not persuaded by a graph. It’s important for me to understand that not only is it data or numbers, but it has to be made accessible with a narrative,” Ginther says. “I ask my students, ‘What’s your story?’ That is part of their scholarly communications.” Pasik-Duncan also requires her students to articulate the meaning of their calculations and explain their reasoning in words. “You have to be critical,” she says. “I always say, ‘Make the case like a winning case in court.’ You have to start with the data, but if you’re not a mathematician, you don’t get the
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data yourself. If you have outliers, you have to exclude some outliers.” Once students are fluent in the math and become accustomed to using math as a communication tool, all three of the professors agree it can feel like it’s easier not to have to explain it—making it tempting to take shortcuts. “I often have students write out their steps in their homework. I want them to explain what they’re doing in words and not just show the math,” Rudnick says. “Doing research, you get thrown a bunch of stuff, and you have to decide what’s important. There is no right answer—you are finding the right answer. Research is tackling some problem that no one has ever done before. This can be challenging for students at first.”
PURSUING RESEARCH USING MATH Disciplines like economics, physics and engineering involve both research that incorporates math and research that is about the math itself. The higher levels of questions involve accounting for increasing numbers of unknowns, but it is important to allow the data to create itself and exist separately from what your ideas and hypotheses might be. “There’s an ideation part. I always have a theory in mind when I go to the data. We need to have a model of how the data should behave. We use that to understand which aspects of the data are causing the outcome that we want to study,” Ginther says. In order to interpret the data, the researcher must establish a mathematical model into which he or she must input the data and see how it behaves. Even the most basic mathematical models must account for unknowns or outside forces. “We use modeling, but we also discuss how nonmath people will not use modeling—they use ‘white noise,’ so then the ‘noise’ is modeled,” Pasik-Duncan says. And that is how mathematics is ever-changing, because as the models evolve, the possibility for error from outside the models also evolves. Math is continual critical thinking, deciding which factors are the most important to the research or the problem, and which do not apply or have an effect in the situation. Rudnick says not only is mindset helpful outside of mathematical disciplines but in the rest of life, as well. “How do I make decisions based on complex information? How do I gauge certainty or uncertainty?” These are the types of questions that can be answered while studying physics and astronomy, he adds. Applying those ideas in astronomy, Rudnick has students combine a star’s luminosity and temperature to determine the age of the star. Of course, there is a lot unknown about the star, but students can take all the traits of stars, including 38
their brightness, and decide which aspects of the traits apply to the star in question. From there, they can make an informed guess about the star’s age. There is a story in words that can be told about the star, and that story is furthered by the math applied to it. Ginther’s current economics research similarly has a narrative that can be explained in words and then is both detailed and solidified with the math. She has been looking at the connection between people who work in teams in academic research and their subsequent career outcomes—how much does the size of the academic researcher’s team affect his or her individual career outcomes from that research? So far, her findings are that the bigger the team the researcher is a part of, the lower his or her chances of getting an academic job. It is difficult to identify the individual’s contributions to that research. This paragraph explains that research in words, but of course, there is math that describes the research in more specific detail.
MATH GETS A BAD REP All three professors are plenty aware that there are many purported “math haters” out there. They hear the jokes and commentary of people who don’t understand the need for certain types of math being required in high school and believe most people won’t actually use that math in their lives. And they are each genuinely troubled by that perception. Pasik-Duncan is the faculty adviser for KU’s chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics and KU’s coordinator for Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month in April each year. She is a tireless advocate for math and all of its applications, but also for mathematics as a place of solace from the challenges of the world. She has helped establish annual math competitions at KU for students in grades 3 through 12 to discover that the fun of math and the challenge of math can go hand in hand. Rudnick says people have the common preconception that they are not good at math. He thinks much of that is connected to the quality of math teachers in their early school years, saying good math teachers earlier on is “hugely beneficial” to students’ general opinion of math. For her part, Ginther says avoidance of math prevents women from participating in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) majors, and teacher biases against girls doing math are at least partly to blame. This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics winner, Claudia Goldin, researched reasons for women’s growth as part of the labor market in the United States and found sources for why gender gaps remain. Ginther says that as a result of Goldin’s research, we still have work and change to do about how we teach math and approach math for girls and young women. p
Changing the Scoreboard Using data to get from question to answer, going beyond statistics to get to the win. By Nick Spacek, photos by Steven Hertzog
“It is the questions and answers that matter, not the numbers,” says baseball writer Bill James in the last lines of a recent email. “The numbers are just a pathway between the question and the answer.” James, an influential American baseball writer, historian and statistician, lives in a well-appointed house in Old West Lawrence. A massive wooden carving of a baseball player greets us in the foyer. The nature of his work covers hundreds of articles, more than two dozen books and the ever-influential development of sabermetrics. The latter, as James puts it, is “the search for objective knowledge about baseball” and led to an entire chapter in Michael Lewis’ 2003 book, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” being devoted to James. In 2011, the film, “Moneyball,” was made based on this nonfiction book. That search for objective knowledge, however, has changed over the years, the author says. “When I started doing this, which is almost 50 years ago, there were really basic things that could be answered with fairly simple research,” James explains. “We’ve run through most of those—not to say that we’ve answered all of the basic questions.” Those issues most in need of research now are harder to get to, he continues. When he started using sabermetrics—detailed statistical analysis of baseball data used to evaluate player performance and develop playing strategies—the idea of asking how many runs a player had created was new, which he believes is incredible, being that would likely be the first thing people would ask about a hitter. “The idea is to change the scoreboard, so the question is how many times does he change the scoreboard, and how much does he do to change the scoreboard,” James says. “It’s a really basic thing, and I created (and others created) simple formulas to address that issue. 40
Bill James, baseball writer, historian and statistician. Creator of Sabermetrics
“What is the relationship between runs and wins, and how many extra runs do you have to add to the scoreboard to change the win-loss record?” As he explains, it’s a pretty simple question with an equally simple answer: With nine or 10 extra runs, you get an extra win. The issues he deals with now, however, are beyond immediate reach. “Most of the field has devolved into smaller and smaller questions,” says James, asking, “If we move the first baseman a foot to his left, does that save us a hit a year, or does it not? It’s really important for major league teams to have answers to questions like that, because every win is worth a lot of money.”
THE FIRST QUESTION Additionally, he says there are people who will insist that what a player does off the field has no relevance to his value to a team, which James finds absurd. “I mean, a player doesn’t take the field and figure out how to play. All of the things that make him a major league player are done off the field and before he gets on the field.” While James and his colleagues can’t address that issue with exact numbers, it doesn’t mean it’s not real. It’s still important, and you still have to worry about it, he says. “You still have to try to factor it into your estimates of value even though you lack any coherent, consistent way to measure it.” All of these questions began back when James was in high school and already a rabid baseball fan, listening to games on the radio whenever possible. It was those radio broadcasts that first raised the questions he’d go on to answer later in life. 41
“If you listen to a broadcast, they have answers to every question, right?” James asks. “They have answers to all of those questions, and they’re happy to tell you what they are—usually several times a game. But they don’t know, they’re just making stuff up. It’s not difficult to see they don’t actually know. By the time I was 15, I was aware that the answers they were giving to those questions were inconsistent and illogical.” In 1965, the Dodgers won the pennant with Wes Parker playing first base, James explains. Parker was a great fielder but a weak hitter. The year after that, the team signed notorious slugger Dick Stuart, and they started him some at first base, but it was a controversy as to whether that was a smart decision. “One thing you would hear surprisingly often was that Parker’s glove probably saved the Dodgers a hit a game with his fielding, but there was a question whether he could hit enough to stay in the lineup,” he continues. “I figured that if he was an average fielder and hit the way he did, that his value was the same as if he was the hitter he was but add one hit a game, which would have meant that he was a 470 hitter.” To James, the Dodgers debating whether they should keep a 470 hitter in the lineup didn’t make sense. As an obsessive baseball fan, contradictions like this were everywhere and not difficult to spot, so when he came to the University of Kansas (KU) and studied economics, rather than applying it to economic questions, he applied it to baseball questions.
ANSWERING THE QUESTIONS Economics is, in part, a study of value, and to James, it’s a study of how many of X are worth how much of Y. In the case of James’ Dodgers’ revelation, how many hits is a fielder worth? How many hits is a runner worth? “There’s an on-field economy in which the elements are not dollars and cents, but runs and hits and wins,” he says. “Basically, I misapplied my education. That’s how I got here.” James is able to measure and create data to get to his answers because in baseball, data about games played is easily collected, and the game was extremely well-organized very early on. So the data accumulated for a hundred years before people began applying it seriously meant what would become his life’s work had a hundred years of a backlog of data. “Since then, we’ve added a lot of data,” James admits, although quickly explaining that data collection is not the problem. “My problem is knowing what the question is and figuring out what data I need to answer that question. And then it’s somebody else’s problem to create the data.” James’ work through the years has transformed into data that can be applied in both economic terms and in terms of who to recruit for a team. But now, it can also be used for entertainment purposes such as fantasy sports. Business and entertainment being two different things means James has to make what he’s learned through his work understandable to the layperson. How? The answer, he says, is the ubiquity of measurement. “If I was really writing about the numbers, or if it was the numbers themselves that were important, then what you just said wouldn’t be true,” James explains. “You wouldn’t be able to apply them to both games and business. It’s the fact that it’s not about the numbers themselves but about something external for the numbers that makes them useful in both games and business.” For example, he likens the ubiquity of measurement of how good Babe Ruth was compared to players today to the question of how high a mountain is. “You have to have a topographical map of the quality of play,” James explains. “People won’t understand the issue itself, but they understand the concept of topographical maps. We can do the same thing about quality of play over time. We just have to study it in a lot of different ways. But you have to have a common reference point like a topographical map in order to help people understand it.” This method of study and analysis is more a holistic approach as opposed to a data-driven approach. James says he’s not a data scientist for that reason. “The guy who had my name—the 19th-century philosopher, William James—wrote about the way that there are questions that drop down from the sky, and there are questions that rise up from the ground,” he says. “You have to live in the middle of them, and you have to find a way to tie the knowledge that grows up from the ground to the knowledge that drops down from the sky.” 42
James says people think he deals strictly with knowledge that grows up from the ground, but he actually deals with questions that drop down from the sky. That misunderstanding of his work is not a new thing, he continues, referencing the line in the “Moneyball” movie about how much baseball hated him: “You’re not buying into this Bill James bull****?” asks John Poloni, played by actor Jack McGee. “And it’s true,” James says with a laugh. “What I faced in the first 15 years I was doing this was a lot of hostility, and that hostility has pretty much dissipated over the years. People don’t resent my doing this anymore. The biggest change is the disappearance of that.”
ACCUMULATING AN AUDIENCE When James started doing what he was doing, many people would say to him, “Well, I think what you’re doing is really interesting, but you’re never going to make a living doing it, because there just aren’t that many of us who are interested in it,” James says. So many people told him that, but he didn’t believe it to be true, he explains, because if 50 people who you know tell you they’re interested in what you’re doing, that’s certainly something worth noting. When James started working on this concept in the’70s, Lawrence, Kansas, had a population of roughly 40,000 people. “If one person in 40,000 is interested in what you’re doing, and you multiply that to the size of the country, then there’s a market, there’s an audience for it, and that issue is resolved,” James calculates, explaining that he believed in the existence of that audience more than anyone else did. At the same time, however, he underestimated its size by thousands. “I knew there was an audience there, but I envisioned that audience as being a few thousand people around the country, whereas it turns out to be many, many millions,” James says, with equal parts amazement and satisfaction. “What I really did was to open the door to those people. That’s all I really did was to insist on opening that door, which people told me was a waste of time. But it wasn’t, and it turned out that there weren’t a thousand people hiding in that room waiting to get out. There were a million. That’s really what made me who I am.” p
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Making it Count - Reaping What They Sow Many factors go into running a successful farming operation, and math is key to keeping production running smoothly and ultimately making a profit. By Anne Brockhoff, photos by Steven Hertzog
You know autumn is coming when the nights grow cooler, days shorter and leaves prettier. Another sign? Combines chewing their way through local corn and soybean fields. Harvest typically begins in September, and the process looks straightforward from the road. A combine’s header pulls dried stalks in, then grain is threshed, cleaned and funneled into the hopper. When the hopper is full, grain is offloaded into a waiting grain cart or truck. The grain is sold, and the cycle begins again when farmers replant fields in the spring. Simple, right? Nope. Beef cattle and grain contributed $90 million to Douglas County’s economy in 2022, and those dollars represent countless decisions. Farmers must consider which crops to plant where and when and how best to manage those fields at each stage of growth. Those with cattle analyze everything from herd genetics, health and nutrition to the timing of breeding, calving, weaning and sales. Producers estimate expenses and forecast yields and profits, but the twin uncertainties of markets and weather can upend those equations at any moment. There’s no way to know how the math will work out until the crops and cattle are sold. “I’ve heard producers say farming is not a single, $1-million decision,” says Mark Dikeman, executive director of the Kansas Farm Management Association (KFMA), which is housed within Kansas State University’s department of agricultural economics and provides detailed accrual financial analysis for the farmers it works with. “It’s a million $1 decisions. If you make a significant number of good decisions over time, it will add up to profitability.” 46
QUANTIFYING THE DATA Those decisions typically fall into two categories: planning production and limiting risk, and both rely on quality data and information. When it comes to planting, managing and harvesting grain, farmers have more of that at their fingertips now than ever before thanks to precision agriculture. Precision ag combines technologies like global positioning systems (GPSs), geographic information systems (GISs) and yield monitors with software, mobile apps and other tools to track production, sometimes down to the square foot. Tractor guidance systems and autosteering, variable-rate technology for seeding and fertilizer application, and grid or zone soil-sampling allow inputs to be optimized while monitoring nutrient and water usage, weather damage, disease outbreaks, yields and more. With built-in cellular modems in their tractors and smartphones in their pockets, farmers can access that information in real time. “Everything is a data point that can be quantified,” says Margit Kaltenekker, agriculture extension agent for KState Research & Extension-Douglas County. “It’s all tied back to cost. What’s the payback?” That depth of information gives producers a jump-start on planning for next season. Which varieties to plant, how much fertilizer and fuel to purchase, what equipment needs to be replaced and how to finance it, how to minimize tax liability—much of that might be plotted out
six or more months before planting even begins. The beef industry’s lead time is even longer. Cows have a gestation period of 285 days, and any bulls they have (called steers after being castrated) take at least 14 months to reach a market weight of about 1,200 to 1,400 pounds. That adds up to almost two years of care and management before seeing any return on investment. “It takes a lot longer to know if a decision was good or bad in the cattle business,” Dikeman says. Each cattle operation has its own goals. Some raise purebred cattle to sell as seedstock to other cattle producers. Others have crossbred commercial herds and focus solely on beef production. Either way, animals are assessed both on physical traits like size and muscling, and their genetic potential. Past performance is one way of gauging whether to keep a bull or cow in the herd. Statistics known as EPDs (expected progeny differences) can be used to estimate an animal’s ability to pass critical traits like carcass quality or reproductive ability on to offspring. And that’s only the start. Recordkeeping is essential, and producers track cows, bulls and calves through the entire production cycle. Bulls are semen-tested before being turned out with cows; artificial insemination is another breeding tool. Cows are later pregnancy-checked, and calves are weighed at birth and after being weaned at between 6 and 8 months of age.
Kermit Kalb plows the fields he and his son Stephen work together
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Mark Wulfkuhle framed by cattle fencing Brenna Wulfkuhle with her daughter Baylee The Wulfkuhle’s inspecting and treating cattle with their vet
UNDERSTANDING PRICES How do farmers and ranchers manage that uncertainty? The first step is understanding where prices come from. Corn, soybeans, cattle and other agricultural commodities are traded as futures contracts, which are a legal agreement to buy or sell a commodity for a predetermined price at a specified time in the future.
What happens next depends on the numbers. Farmers and ranchers decide which animals to keep as replacement breeding stock and which to feed out. They calculate the expected cost of feed, forage, supplements and other inputs, and evaluate market prices and opportunities with an eye toward what it will cost to produce a pound of beef. “There are just so many variables right now,” says Brenna Wulfkuhle. She and her husband, Mark, raise row crops and cattle on their Rocking H Ranch, in western Douglas County; they are also partners in 2BMD Farms. “Every day it seems to change for us, because you never know what you’re going to get paid. It’s all based on the market.” 48
Cash prices are what feed mills, processors, exporters and other users are willing to pay for a bushel of grain on any given day, or what buyers are paying for livestock at the area sale barn. The basis—an essential figure producers use to decide when to buy or sell—is the difference between the cash price and price of the closest futures delivery month. Grain prices do follow cyclical patterns to some extent—they tend to drop during harvest and rise early the next year, when less is available. It’s driven by supply and demand, and anything that affects either of those practically anywhere in the world can push prices higher or lower. For example, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture said this year’s U.S. corn harvest would total a higher-than-expected 15.2 billion bushels on Nov. 9, corn futures sank to their lowest level in almost three years. Continued disruption of exports in the Black Sea region following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, stronger import demand from China, severe drought in Brazil (the world’s biggest soybean exporter) and even Argentina’s presidential race have each triggered price fluctuations at various times this year. “Every little thing that happens overseas affects our market,” says Jimmy Neis, who owns Neis Bros. Farms, near Eudora, with his wife, Kelly, and his brothers and their wives, Dale and Trish Neis, and Stan and Kari Neis. They raise row crops and cattle in Douglas, Leavenworth and Johnson counties.
Jimmy Neis and his brothers Dale and Stan. They work their farms together sharing all the chores like tending to their cattle
SELLING NOW OR LATER Grain can be either sold immediately after harvest or stored to capture higher prices at a future date. That flexibility means farmers can meet local demand from end users such as East Kansas Agri-Energy, an ethanol plant in Garnett, and exporters such as The Delong Co. Inc., in Edgerton, when prices rise. They can also forward-contract with those buyers to deliver a set quantity for a certain price at a future date. Options can also be used to hedge against losses. This type of agricultural derivative differs from futures in that they give producers the right, not the obligation, to buy or sell contracts at a specified price at any time before the contract expires. Farmers view options as protection. When they purchase an option at a certain price (known as a “put;” an option to sell is a “call”), that locks in a floor price for their crop. If the market goes up, they can let the put expire. But if prices fall, they can exercise the option to sell at that higher price. To make all of that work, farmers must also take transportation costs and availability into account. Must they pay someone to deliver the grain, or do they have the trucks and time to haul it themselves? Storage costs must also be considered. Companies such as Cargill store grain for customers for a fee, while some producers prefer to rely on on-farm storage. It’s all a trade-off, says Stephen Kalb, who farms with his parents, Kermit and Margaret Kalb, mostly in Douglas County, with nearby parcels in Johnson and Franklin counties. “We have to calculate if it’s worth the storage cost to capture next year’s market bump,” says Kalb, who was a grain trader before returning to the family farm two decades ago. 50
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Stephen and Kermit Kalb take a break from their farm chores to discuss what else needs to get done that day Stephen pointing to how new apps help with watering their property
Cattle markets are trickier because of the long production cycle and the fact that market-ready cattle can’t be “stored” in the same way grain can. That was especially evident in 2020, when disruptions in the meat-processing industry created a backlog of finished livestock. Producers had to shoulder continued feed and other expenses while they waited for that to clear, which cut profits. “When COVID hit, that screwed up the whole thing, and we lost money,” says Neis, whose farm until that point retained ownership of its steers until they reached market weight. He now typically sells steers when they weigh 850 to 900 pounds. “The last couple of years, we’ve been taking them to the sale barn and letting the next guy carry the risk,” he says.
MANAGING WEATHER Weather is another variable. There’s no stopping what comes, farmers say, but you can manage the impact. That proved challenging in 2023, the driest year to date in Douglas County for the past 129 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Integrated Drought Information System. Searing heat and spotty rainfall stressed area ponds and pastures. So instead of watering their 150 head of cattle for free from ponds, the Wulfkuhles moved part of the herd to where they could access rural water—an unexpected expense. Pastures produced less grass, which means they’ll likely start feeding hay earlier in the season than usual, Brenna Wulfkuhle says.
Stephen going through all the different information they now have at their fingertips using high tech apps for farming
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“Mark’s been out recounting bales of hay and figuring out how many bales we need to feed every three days to keep cows where they need to be,” she explains. Drought also took a toll on row crops. While the corn and wheat harvests did surprisingly well, Kalb says his soybeans “never had a chance.” “So we’re two out of three,” says Kalb, who also has cattle. Although irrigation is an option, pivot systems are expensive, and allotments are limited. And drought is only one challenge. Too much rain at the wrong time, late freezes, hail and other weather events also cause damage. That’s where crop insurance comes in, Neis says. “That helps you get through to the next year,” he adds. There are two types of crop insurance. The first is through the Federal Crop Insurance Program, which offers subsidized multiple peril crop insurance to cover yield losses from natural causes like drought or disease; protection against revenue loss because of a drop in yields or prices is also available. This is regulated by the federal government and sold through private insurers. Insurance companies also sell state-regulated crop-hail policies. Other policies are available to livestock producers, as well. It’s a significant safety net. Kansas farmers in 2022 spent $433.4 million for insurance coverage, and the industry paid $2.2 billion to cover losses from extreme weather and other factors, according to industry nonprofit National Crop Insurance Services.
PARTNERS IN PROFIT The need to constantly scrutinize all the information, prices and other details that affect the profitability of a diversified farming operation can be time-consuming. That’s why producers frequently rely on input from grain merchandisers,
agronomists, nutritionists, veterinarians, accountants and other professionals. “There are so many facets to agriculture that people don’t see,” Wulfkuhle says. “Some of those people help crunch the numbers to make those in farming and ranching more successful.” Banks are also essential partners. Agriculture is a capitalintensive industry, one where the expenses and income typically flow during different times of year, KFMA’s Dikeman says. “The investment to be a commercial producer is extraordinary,” he explains. “It would not be unheard of for someone to have $1½ or $2 million in equipment. That’s not even counting investments in land.” Short-term operating loans can smooth out cash flow, while banks offer financing for bigger purchases. Ag lending is an increasingly competitive industry that includes commercial banks, the Farm Credit System and insurance companies; financing is also available from equipment manufacturers and ag product suppliers. How farmers and ranchers interact with their lenders has changed over the past decade, Dikeman says. Banks used to look primarily at a farm’s balance sheet, issue loans based on equity and foreclose if a loan wasn’t repaid. Lenders now behave more like partners, looking closely at cash flow, a balance sheet’s debt-to-asset ratio and other financial information before making financing decisions, he continues. It all comes back to the numbers and how well farmers and ranchers can manage the constant flow of production and financial information generated by their operations. “Every day, (producers) are doing something with math,” Dikeman explains. “They’re always using numbers to make important management decisions.” p
Paul Werner (center) with associate Leticia Cole of Paul Werner Architecture and Mark Green of BA Green going over the plans for the new offices of Oral Surgery Kansas
Go Figure A Ma th Affair Math
The many facets of mathematics come together to not only solve simple day-to-day calculations but also enhance overall creative problem-solving and critical thinking. by Bob Luder, photos by Steven Hertzog
Paul Werner is a self-described math geek. Alex Karam earned a master’s degree in mathematics and taught college math. Today, they work as architect and engineer, respectively. Werner is owner of Paul Werner Architects, in downtown Lawrence, which, in collaboration with Gould Evans, had hands in designing and creating everything from Sports Pavilion Lawrence and Rock Chalk Park to renovating popular local spots like Lawrence Beer Co. and Bon Bon!, as well as high-end custom homes. Karam is a partner with Latimer Sommers & Associates, an engineering consulting firm with a focus on mechanical, electrical, plumbing and telecommunication design with offices in Topeka and Overland Park. Both have enjoyed longstanding love affairs with mathematics and math principles that have served them well—and continue to be of use—in their chosen fields. Whether it’s the simpler side of measuring dimensions in planning construction of a building, the geometry involved in calculating the angle of the pitch of a roof, something more complicated such as figuring ratios of various weights and supports for load-management purposes or even keeping expenses and income straight when dealing with the company books, math and its myriad applications play major roles in being a successful architect or engineer. 56
Alex Karam, partner and engineer for Latimer, Sommers & Associates an engineering consulting firm with a focus on mechanical, electrical, plumbing and telecommunication design
Same goes for local firms like Bartlett & West, a full-service engineering company with branch offices throughout the country, or Hoke Ley Architecture & Design, a multidisciplinary architecture firm in east Lawrence that is involved in luxury residential and commercial projects around the U.S. When it comes to most of their day-to-day work procedures, rest assured the application of mathematics principles are in the consciousness. Even the subconsciousness. “All the stuff we do is technical in nature,” Werner says. “Even though most of what we do is on computers, you still have to have an understanding of it. Even if you run a computer program, you still have to put in the right information. “We probably use math even more than we think we are,” he adds. As Karam says, most of what any kind of engineer—electrical, mechanical, plumbing, civic, environmental—does in their day-to-day work involves formulas. All those formulas involve math. “Every day, we use math in our calculations,” he says. “Some are simpler, like coming up with total tonnage for a building. Others are more complicated. Some we establish our own rules of thumb and use our experience. “It’s all based on mathematics and mathematical equations you’ve got to plug in if you want to get the result you want,” Karam explains.
MATH’S USE IN CRITICAL THINKING Werner, who oversees a staff of nine in his offices in the lower level of a historic building on Eighth Street, remembers sitting in his college calculus classes and being enthralled— and not simply with the numbers and symbols on a blackboard or piece of paper. “I think calculus is as much about how to solve problems as much as actual math,” says Werner, who holds degrees in both architecture and architectural engineering. “Just the idea that you have limits at both ends of a problem, and you have to figure out the right answer that fits between those two limits … . That always interested me.” It’s also served Paul Werner Architects well as it’s gone about designing commercial and residential projects, site planning, zoning, analyzing building code and urban planning. One of the firm’s most visible projects in recent months is the new construction of a building for Oral Surgery Kansas at Sixth Street and Monterey Way. He points out that much of the math involves simple business calculations centered around costs of construction and interest rates—basically, how much a project will cost to complete. “We do a lot of work for developers and financing comes into it,” he explains. “Whether a project can make money.” 57
Bartlett & West engineered the new DCCCA building and the Wakarusa Wastewater Treatment Facility in Lawrence, Ks
And all that seems to have one thing in common. “As you go into the design world, there’s a lot of math involved in everything you do,” Caldwell says. “Geometry, trigonometry … . Figuring out volumes of things.
Geometry comes into play on something like the pitches of roofs. Many roofs are built on what is commonly called 6 by 12: 6 inches in rise for every 12 inches it goes out. Calculations are commonly made on where to place exit doors on a building to meet city building codes. All these calculations are made via computer programs, but as Werner says, it’s always good to hold that basic math knowledge close, for the critical thinking aspect if nothing else. “I’ve tried to stay on top of technology,” he says. “It’s all good. The more you can learn, the better you are.”
USING MATH IN ESTIMATIONS Joe Caldwell started his career at Bartlett & West 30 years ago as a project engineer. Today, he’s the company’s chief executive officer and leads a company that is 100 percent owned by its 430 employees who serve customers in seven states. According to its website, Bartlett & West is an engineering firm offering deep industry knowledge and creative problem-solving skills to help plan, design and build projects … leveraging technology to solve problems and deliver innovative solutions to meet client needs, whether it be construction and survey, environmental planning, landscape architecture, storm and wastewater, or site development. 58
“It can get really precise,” he continues. “But a lot of times, we don’t have details, so we’re using judgments to make estimations. A lot of the numbers are very precise, but you also have to be able to estimate and understand if those estimates make sense. And you have to use math in those estimations.” Caldwell uses hydrology, calculations used in controlling stormwater, as an example. “Sometimes it’s as much of an art as it is a science,” he says. “None of it is perfect. There’s a lot of feel in it. “When you think about a building or bridge, it’s very precise,” Caldwell adds. “But there are a lot of other critical-thinking pieces, a lot of judgment. Being able to visualize what the outcome is [is] important to a great design. You have to have common sense.” Road design, in which designers must calculate pitch to allow for proper storm drainage, is another area where geometry and other mathematical calculations come into play, he says. Design criteria guidelines vary depending on the area and landscape. Slopes and cross slopes must be factored in to ensure there’s at least a 1 percent grade so that water runs off. Wastewater engineers have to mathematically calculate what is referred to as “biology loading,” which is determining how much volume of chemicals is used to properly treat wastewater. And then, there’s the business of engineering. Caldwell uses the Kansas Department of Transportation as an example. The department is very particular about the quantity of prod-
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Katie Hoke (standing outside) and Caleb Amundson, of Hoke Ley Architects led the design and reimagining of the new Great Harvest Bread Bakery and Cafe. Working with the client's modest budget and existing building features, they were able to transform an un-inspiring vacant building into a vibrant cafe for the community. Working with the existing flooring and ceiling, they used warm natural materials to create a welcoming customer experience. Hoke Ley worked closely with the owner to create the custom kitchen layout.
ucts used on its projects, he says. Various project models must be modified or manipulated to fit the department’s “bid list.” “There’s a lot of scoping work involved,” he explains. “You have to show the client the scope and how the fee was calculated. “The goal is to help the company be successful with the job while also making the client happy,” Caldwell says.
“WOVEN INTO HOW WE WORK” While Hoke Ley is small in its workforce—only five employees— it’s mighty in its architectural footprint throughout the Lawrence area and beyond. There have been renovations to structures that house Stephens Real Estate, Great Harvest Bread Co. and Encore Cafe, along with a number of private residences. But there also are Hoke Ley projects in the Pacific Palisades in the Los Angeles area, luxury homes in Scottsdale, Arizona, and commercial projects in Nebraska, as well as those in the Kansas City and St. Joseph, Missouri, areas. Those projects, and nearly everything else Hoke Ley is involved in, have involved math. “It’s completely woven into how we work,” says Katie Hoke, principal, owner. Everything is ratios and proportions. Everything we do is numbers-based, whether it’s laying out square footage, spacing, how you work out measurements in feet and inches.” Hoke says her company works in even increments when planning building foundations. Framing is done in what she calls “24-6-8 modules” when possible, ensuring that pieces of plywood fit perfectly next to one another. On the interiors of buildings, the layout of floor and wall tiles must be calculated carefully to properly fit the space so there isn’t a need for a sliver of tile in the end. There also are area-volume calculations that are constantly be-
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Paul Werner and Leticia Cole stand inside the centralized sterilization and lab space which has a corner of glass for visibility and connection between the two pods of treatment rooms at the new home of Oral Surgery Kansas
MATH AND FORMULAS ing made … if a volume of earth is being displaced, what is it being replaced with? “We’re focused a lot on the human scale of spaces,” she says. “That all comes down to proportions of space. We know from experience what proportions work, but it’s also scale. “A lot of design is rooted in math. None of us are real experts at math,” Hoke continues. “We just know how to apply it to what we’re working on.” She agrees wholeheartedly that much of the value of having knowledge in mathematics lies in the exercise of problem-solving and critical thinking. “I have a daughter who’s a (high school) freshman taking algebra, and she asked me, ‘Why would I use this?’ ” Hoke says. “I told her you need to learn to exercise the brain, know how to break the rules. It’s the iterative process of breaking down the process of solving a problem. That’s very important. “You don’t ever want to get lucky,” she adds. “You want to know exactly how we got to the end point. And then, when you get the right answer, you want to get to it more quickly the next time. “You don’t have to be a math genius. You just have to embrace it and have an understanding of how to use it,” Hoke says. 62
Karam started in 1999 as an engineer in training and became licensed and a partner in 2007 at Latimer Sommers & Associates, which has been around more than 65 years, services a minimum of 15 states per year and designs systems that average more than $500 million in construction costs each year. He says the firm currently has projects ongoing in Florida, Mississippi, Missouri and Oklahoma. Most successful engineering comes down to one thing, he explains, having workable formulas and knowing how to use them. And there’s a certain knowledge required in working through these formulas. “In engineering, whatever we do, there are formulas we use,” Karam says. “Those are all mathematics. Without it, we cannot get to the answers we need.” He says engineering uses the Psychrometric Chart to calculate building load for HVAC units. From sensible load, latent load, humidification load, cooling load, etc. … these energy calculations are all based on mathematical formulas where values must be plugged in and obtained from the Psychrometric Chart to find a final value. Like most engineers or architects who work with math in today’s technological age, the answers to formulas or problems are as easy and as close as a button on a computer. But that doesn’t appear to be good enough for an old engineering hand like Karam. “As a young engineer, I did (calculations) by hand,” he says. “I wanted to know what all the numbers mean. Doing calculations by hand for so many years gave me the ability to come up with my own rule of thumb for different types of buildings’ HVAC load. “Today’s engineers rely more and more on computer values, not knowing if these values make sense or not,” Karam continues. “Computers utilize input parameters and figures to produce output results. While computers are very useful, engineers should also know the equations and math that the computer software uses to calculate the results, to help us determine what parameters are most important and improve our design accordingly.” That’s why Karam didn’t stop his education with a bachelor’s degree in engineering that required extensive math knowledge and earned his master’s in the very discipline he knew he’d use the rest of his professional career. “This way, I had both sides of it,” he says. “That served me well.” p
Renderings for the new KU football stadium designed by Multistudio, an architectural firm in downtown Lawrence
Recipe for Success
A combination of innovation, design and mathematics is the perfect cocktail these businesses use to create top-notch products and to satisfy their clients. By Tara Trenary, photos by Steven Hertzog
From the time we get up in the morning until the time we go to bed, mathematics is an integral part of our daily functions. Managing our time, using a budget, driving, cooking, paying the tab at restaurants, exercising, working. There’s very little in our daily lives in which we don’t use math. According to Cuemath, a leading online math education platform started in 2013, math helps make life orderly and less chaotic, nurturing the powers of reasoning, creativity, abstract or spatial thinking, critical thinking, problem-solving and effective communication skills. Cuemath’s mission is to transform the way children learn math, and the company is backed by investors like Google, Bloomberg and Forbes. It has locations in all 50 states and can be found in more than 80 countries. “Math is a tool in our hands to make our life smoother. The more mathematical we are in our approach, the more rational would be our thoughts,” the site continues. “Math is a medium that should be embraced by everyone in all our walks of life.” Cuemath explains that mathematics creates better problem-solving skills and increased analytical thinking and reasoning abilities in individuals, skills essential in thinking logically about situations and helping people solve problems and look for solutions. So what impact does math have on the business world? What types of professions use math and for what purposes? 64
FROM THE GROUND UP At Multistudio, a Downtown Lawrence architecture firm that has been in operation here for more than 50 years (originally Gould Evans), the aim is to work on projects that can make the most impact in the community and provide an opportunity for its employees to bring value to whatever problem a client is trying to solve, says CJ Armstrong, vice president and architect at Multistudio. The firm, which employs about 150 people in different bases across the country, focuses mainly on commercial work, but each office across the country has a distinct specialty, including house branding, landscape architecture, urban planning, interior design and architecture, to name a few. “We pull on all of those talents, depending on whatever project is working,” he explains. It’s not uncommon for someone from San Francisco or Phoenix or New Orleans to help the Lawrence office on a project or vice versa. “We try to stay pretty flexible and nimble.” Armstrong says math is elemental to architectural design. “Regardless of what you draw, someone must build it, and they cannot do that unless you provide the geometric information to assemble the pieces.” He explains that math has traditionally been the foundational component of architecture, allowing a project to go from 2Ddrafted designs to built structures. “We are using more than just geometry but complex mathematical algorithms to develop generative designs. We are able to process massive pools of data to inform our projects at a level unheard of a decade ago.” The majority of Multistudio’s daily design work is geometry and algebra, Armstrong says. Other areas of math used at the firm include logic, statistics and computational (comput-
er-assisted) math, depending on a project’s specific needs. Architects must geometrically tell a contractor how to build what they’ve drawn, make sure dimensions add up, understand tolerances (how close things can fit together without causing interference) and be able to understand the relationships of different sized objects to one another. “And a big portion of what we do is helping clients understand budgets and construction costs. So there’s an algebra component to that.” Multistudio architects also use generative design, tasking the computer with doing data set analysis. “There’s a software platform we use that effectively creates genomes of your design, so you can test thousands of iterations of your design based off of constraints that you give it, and it tries to find the best fit,” he continues. “So it’s going through and following the algorithms and calculations that you set up to come up with a best fit solution.” The software provides a visual representation of what the code the architect is linking together is doing. These links feed data and information and data sets from one node to another. The architect can build out complex geometry and scripting processes without actually having to do the math. “Being able to automate that is huge,” Armstrong explains. “With the advent of AI (artificial intelligence), that’s getting exponential. Now we are literally trying to understand what data we currently have and how to mine that data, how to extract pertinent information out of it.” Multistudio is currently working on transforming the David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium into the University of Kansas Gateway District. It will include a reimagined stadium, a new conference center, multiuse facilities that can be used year-round, new retail, dining and other amenities. A project this large is multidimensional and complex. 65
A COMMUNITY PROJECT Early planning on the Gateway project took about a year. That included talking through the project with all parties involved, putting together sketches, idea generation, discussing seat counts, capacity and budgets. Next, discussion turned toward creating the design and the process. “Once we get a sense of the general direction (of a project), then we start actually putting pen to paper,” Armstrong explains. “What’s this actually going to look like? How do we take this very complex 3D structure and make a set of 2D drawings that somebody has to build off of?” Today, the stadium design is largely locked in in terms of the design of the bowl, the lighting and seat counts. “Now we’re into what we call a construction document phase, where we’re largely going through the mathematical process of making sure we’re meeting all of the code requirements. Do we have the correct number of toilets? Do we have the correct clearances to make sure that somebody in a wheelchair can get in?”
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The International Code Council requires use of a code book that “addresses design and installation of innovative materials that meet or exceed public health and safety goals.” Its aim is to preserve public health and safety, and provide safeguards from hazards associated with the built environment. “It’s several thousands of pages of all the standards we must abide by. They’re basically very complicated word problems,” Armstrong explains. “If you have this situation, you must comply with this. They are standards that we all have to meet in order for a building to be compliant and fit the needs of the community.” And many different entities get involved in the process. The City of Lawrence and the State of Kansas will review all the documents on the Gateway project and make sure local, state and national regulations are met. The State Fire Marshall has a set of codes that must be followed. Lawrence-Douglas County Fire and Medical has its own codes. Each group does a review to make sure the project is in compliance with its specific codes. “Lots of people are looking in because it’s a huge project, and we want to make sure people are safe,” Armstrong continues. And those codes extend not just to architecture, but they have a separate set of codes for structure, mechanical, electrical and plumbing, and fireproofing. Every component of the building has some set of regulations that dictate how it has to go together.
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“KU has been a great partner, not just in this but in a lot of the other projects we’ve done on campus. And Lawrence, as a whole, has a lot of voices and opinions, which is actually a great thing. It’s been a good home for us,” he adds.
CREATING BEAUTY THROUGH MATH Construction Specialties, local construction and remodeling professionals, specializes in remodeling kitchens and bathrooms, as well as construction additions and some exterior work, says Mike Warner, CEO and partner. “We offer guidance that makes our customers’ tastes pop and help guide them through the decision-making process in a straightforward and logical format. A lot of what we do is coordination of ideas between vendors and other contractors to produce the desired results.” He explains that residential remodeling is much different than commercial, because their customers live in the environment they are working on and are invested personally and financially in the project. “The process is intimate,” he says. “When you input customers with varying degrees of experience and ability to visualize the results, sometimes you can have a challenging environment. But this is what we love to do, and our results speak for themselves.” Warner says math is the most important part of what he does all day every day. “On my computer right now, if you look, you see nothing but math. This is a software program that works with sizes and shapes.” The software he uses daily creates 3D layouts—he draws out the space, and the computer does a lot of the math, including estimating remodeling projects, figuring out quantities, detecting risk factors and trying to figure out tolerances for risk to make sure the numbers are keeping track of how things might vary.
Construction Specialties CEO Mike Warner and Interior Designer Sarah Kellogg, in their showroom in Lawrence, Ks The bathroom was a complete remodel. They replaced the cheap box store shower with a custom Onyx shower that will make it easy to clean and wont leak. They took out the large clunky whirlpool tub and put in a freestanding tub. The bathroom is now modern, bright and functional Their client's vision for her kitchen was based on a Betty Crocker's advertisement which pictured a red and green kitchen. The client wanted a retro feel that went with her nick nak's. It turned out picture perfect!
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“But I still am doing tons of math. There’s a lot of algebra,” he explains. “Pythagorean theorem, A squared plus B squared, we use a lot of that. In construction, the 3:4:5 method of squaring things up (a three-foot length on your straight line, a fourfoot length on your perpendicular line and a five-foot length across makes a perfectly square corner).” Warner says he spends about 20% of his time with financial numbers of one sort or another, whether it’s budgeting for the company or talking about budgeting on jobs. He creates closing reports for jobs and sits down and goes through margins, among other things, with employees to make sure the company is profitable. Other ways Construction Specialties uses math: to figure out square footage of siding, how many linear feet on products such as trim as well as ratios. “You can imagine that if you’re trying to figure out the linear footage of a whole house, it’s kind of difficult unless you literally spend the time to go measure every single piece of trim,” Warner continues. “You
have to understand a lot of things about math to be able to put all those parts together.” Sarah Kellogg, interior designer with the company, agrees. “I do a lot of budgeting, space planning, dimensioning and figuring costs and amounts of materials. Algebra and geometry are used on a daily basis. Figuring areas, square footage and percentages are examples of the math I do.” In a typical kitchen remodel, Warner creates an estimate, which includes budgets for materials and labor. Kellogg is in charge of the budgets and monitors Excel spreadsheets for each client, which helps her track costs of their selections. She conducts measurements in clients’ homes, including square footages for flooring, backsplash, countertops, etc., to determine how much material is needed. This number determines the square footage price range to stay in for the sake of each client’s budget. She then takes those details to create a floor plan with kitchen and bath design software. “Math is critical here when spaceplanning cabinetry. If measurements are off or miscalculated, the layout may be problematic or wrong at the time of installation, which can be costly,” Kellogg explains. She also submits everything to suppliers for bids and ensures clients stay on budget. Kellogg is part of the management team working directly with clients, but she also does behind-the-scenes work such as social media, applying for permits, creating job books and ordering materials for most jobs. She also works with the media and production team, website designers and photographers to ensure company projects are well represented and shine online and in publications. “First and foremost, function is so important in the spaces we live and work in,” Kellogg explains. “Designers have the ability and duty to ensure the spaces we design are curated specifically for the people who are going to use that space, all while making it aesthetically pleasing.”
THE CLIENT IS KEY Warner says one of the things he thinks some people in business may not understand is the difference between markup and margin, and the importance of both. “You definitely need to understand that they’re not the same word. And they definitely mean different things. The markup is how much you increase the price of something, and the margin is basically what you end up with at the end.” And keeping track of time is also key. “Everybody wants to know when their project is going to start and how long it’s going to take. In our world, every single project that we do is something that’s never been done before, completely custom—a different shape, a different size, a different age of house. There’re 101 different aspects that all play into that.” He says being able to look at all of that and create statistics—how long it’s going to take to get something done, the risk factors, how much you figure in, how you combat risk, do you just put a bunch of markup on top of it, do you solve the problem with historical data and math?
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“Mistakes happen all the time. It’s not a question of whether there’s going to be mistakes, it’s just how you deal with them,” Warner believes. “A lot of being successful, in my opinion, is … knowing what you need to figure out. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last nine years learning. And a lot of my learning has come through making mistakes.” He says in this business, what’s important is the client. “We’re working directly for somebody who is using it, people who are there, living in this space that we’re working on. It’s not a business, it’s their own money. We really like residential construction … because we like to develop those relationships with the customers and get to know them, and come back and do their next job.”
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Alpha Roofing replacing a roof and using copper siding at this old beautiful home in west Lawrence Outside of the new Alpha Roofing headquarters in North Lawrence
A CONSISTENT OUTCOME Since 2004, Alpha Roofing has provided residential and commercial reroof, new construction and repair services to its clients. There is not typically a design component to residential work, as the existing roof system dictates what is installed, and new construction is dictated by the architect or builder. However, “Commercial roofing allows us to flex our design muscle more due to the ever-changing and updating of roof requirements of the flat-roof systems,” says Yvonne Ruder, COO. “Our estimators often lead the roof-design conversation, as we share the manufacture requirements for installation of Tier 1 products with architects and builders.” For roof systems, design is important, as the certified roofers include many factors to create a barrier to moisture intrusion, insulation and ventilation requirements. “An imbalanced system will leave you with many problems down the road,” Ruder continues. With 15 employees and three outside salespersons, Alpha’s process is consistent. A residential roof takes one to two days to complete even though every house and location is different, Ruder explains. They consider logistics, safety 70
and quality of installation on every project. “In our commercial division, extensive strategy takes place. There are many factors that have to be considered. such as weather, product availability and timing, dictated by customers’ needs. “Math is a major and primary component of our estimation,” she continues. “From the size of the roof to the amount of ventilation and insulation required for a balanced roof system to the actual numbers that go into each component ordered and calculated for labor, math is the single most important component.” For example, a roof is measured using geometry and simple math, which includes the imperfect shapes and waste factors. Ruder’s job focuses on process and cost management. “From the team that we have assembled to the way we manage our products and customers, fleet management, invoicing, collection and company budgeting, math is a part of every step I complete in a day,” she adds. Ruder says being aware of the budget is vitally important. Project costs coming in as expected on a current
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JAN 31 job is key initially but equally important to each job down the road. “We evaluate each job at completion to find out if any lessons are to be learned,” she explains. “Our math is easy, but it is rarely simple,” Ruder says. “Calculating the cost of a happy customer, knowing when it is better to do the right thing regardless of the cost is always a calculation. Our customers are educated and want a good-quality product installed by a civic-minded business.”
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THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS Lawrence’s thriving entrepreneurial spirit creates a business environment that is active and cares about growth. Each of these businesses strives to provide the utmost in client satisfaction and uses its resources to the fullest to create the best product possible—with a little bit of math mixed in. “You know, cooking is a word problem, and it gets you to this perfect loaf of bread. Architecture, same deal,” Armstrong explains. “You’re still doing word problems, just on a different scale. You’re following a different recipe.” p
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The Dragon’s Hoard D.J. Cooper
One Move at a Time
In the world of serious board gaming, personal interaction is preferred by many, and math is an intrinsic piece of the puzzle. by Nick Spacek, photos by Steven Hertzog
The Dragon’s Hoard, located at 1045 Pennsylvania St., is owned by D.J. Cooper, Gage Buffington and Ann Cooper, and opened in October 2018. The tabletop gaming store is focused both on selling games to the Lawrence community and “creating a place for people to gather and game,” with its side room featuring tables and space for local gamers to meet and play in person. That physical gathering space was very important to the business from the start, says D.J. Cooper, The Dragon’s Hoard’s primary operator of daily activities. “When I first moved to Lawrence, it had five different game stores, but most of them were all focused more on retail,” D.J. recalls. “None of them really worked on the community. Over the 10 years I was in town, they slowly closed, and I’ve always been a big fan of the community, which is what makes game stores work.” The profit margins on these products are so highly controlled, it’s hard to make money, D.J. explains. So he’s always been a fan of focusing on community and being a place for people to hang out rather than simply to sell a product. 72
“I’ve been gaming since I was 8 years old,” D.J. says. “I’ve been a consultant for game stores since I was 19 years old, and board gaming has always existed. But finding game stores that would focus on it was always harder, and then when I became a board gamer—when I went to other game stores—I’d ask questions about board games, and nobody knew the answer.” That was always a frustration for D.J. because he’d want to know a little bit about the game, get an actual response from someone who plays, and nothing existed in stores. With the creation of the internet, one can find playthrough videos on many of these games, but D.J. still focuses on knowing all about them so Dragon’s Hoard can advise people on the game that’s best suited to them. Their game space has a demo shelf where folks can try out games. Having someone such as D.J. who’s played games in a store like The Dragon’s Hoard, where one can try out a game, is important because, while there are certainly games where you can set up in seconds and play a whole game in less than half an hour, there are also what D.J. calls “heavy games,” which are games that have play times of between two and five hours. It’s a smaller market, because most people don’t want to sit at a table that long, and many heavy games involve heavy mathematics. D.J. offers up a game called Terraforming Mars as an example. “It is known as an ‘engine builder,’ where the decisions you’re making early on mathematically multiply as the game goes,” he says. “So, getting plus 1 resource on turn one multiplies into $45 in 10 turns compared to if you played that same card on turn 10. It’s not as cost-effective, and it doesn’t affect your overall engine, because it came in too late.” Engine builders work by taking a simple mechanic and pairing it with a second simple mechanic, and creating a multiplicable effect. So one thing leads to a second thing, and the player gets a huge payout for very little input. In a game like Terraforming Mars, D.J. continues, there are a lot more choices. As a player of the game, you have a deck of cards that is 400 cards deep with no duplicate cards in the deck. Instead of having known quantities in front of you, you must constantly recalculate the variables. And that’s not even the craziest one, he adds. “I have some that literally have a textbook when you open the box,” D.J. says, referring to a game called Cthulhu Wars. At the time we spoke, it had almost 20 expansion sets and a core rule book that was 300 pages long. That said, despite all the caveats and weird interactions of Cthulhu Wars, it’s a unique game in the industry because it has all of these rules that have been “FAQd” (a list has been put together explaining how the rules work together), and the game plays in only two hours.
“For all the complexity of the game, it has very simple rules, and it mostly acknowledges the interactions between different rules,” D.J. clarifies. “If you don’t have those interactions, then 80% of the rulebook didn’t really matter.” Interestingly enough, the more he explains modern tabletop gaming, the games seem less mathematically driven and more akin to logistical problems. It’s very much a series of if-then statements. “Yep,” D.J. enthusiastically concurs. “The games that involve the most mathematics, besides tallying up your score at the end, are going to be a lot more engine builder-style games.” As to why folks like to get together and play these games, D.J. believes that we, as humans, love personal contact, and even though we’re very much connected online, that’s not enough for most people who desire personal contact. “Hanging out in a chat room with someone all night doesn’t do it,” he says. “One of the things that humans strive to be is in front of each other, so board games have just become an amazing medium for that in the U.S.” In the board game market, the United States is actually behind. For example, Germany and the United Kingdom are both big board game countries, and there’s no nerdy stigma behind it. It’s a family thing. In the States, there are games such as Monopoly and Risk, whereas overseas, games such as Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan and even games like Terraforming Mars are simply family games. “Monopoly’s barely known over there because they have other, better board games,” D.J. explains. “It’s just a thing over there. Gaming has always had a weird stigma in the United States.” He attributes the lack of a tabletop gaming culture in the United States to the fact that the original board games were all heavy games and kept a lot of people out of it. “Board gaming was always this weird niche where most of the board games were ugly, and I didn’t want to play,” D.J. admits. “I mean, I was aware of them. I had a librarian that taught me how to play a really old military game called Platoon.” He describes Platoon as “the (most) hideous game you ever saw,” with white cardboard tiles on a black and white grid with number values. It was a harder game to play than chess, he continues, because there were more caveat rules such as if your tank division runs into an infantry division, you have to calculate what that infantry division’s weapon loadout is and what the odds of them hurting this tank were. Nowadays, D.J. says a lot of the math in games is hidden behind actions or a part of the board game design. 73
“The player never sees the mechanics, so one card will have a plus 1 on it, one card will have a plus 2, and one card will have a plus 3, but I know the bell curve is 36%,” he adds. “All the math goes in the back, and then they change the way it looks to make it easier to flow to the customer or the consumer, because you want it to be fun.” D.J. says he’s learned there are people who will sit down and love to know the fact that it’s a 33% or 60% bell curve, or whatever the mechanics might be, but that’s not most people. That whole culture has changed and continues to change. “The fact that … you can be like, ‘I build custom cars,’ and everyone goes, ‘Oh that’s cool.’ But, ‘I play board games,’ ‘Oh, you must be a nerd,’ has always held back people wanting to get into it,” he explains. But with the change of opinion and culture, it’s really moved the percentages and perceptions, and now, one in three people have played or at least are aware of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). And even Dungeons & Dragons has changed, D.J. continues. Now for all its complexity, essentially all that’s needed is paper, dice and your imagination. Once upon a time, in the early days of D&D, there were more complex equations you used to calculate things such as armor class, because it was more about representing true facts. “It would take five minutes to puzzle it out and to actually sit down and do an equation,” he marvels. “Now they literally go, ‘Alright, you went up a level, you roll a D20 to hit, and you’re level 4, so you get plus 4 to hit. The guy’s [armor class] is just a simple flat number. The math is literally the same but presented in a more logical, easy-toread format.” D.J. doesn’t know the folks who wrote the original rules for Dungeons & Dragons, but he has to think they loved math: “Some of the equations [they] came up with to calculate characters and statistical odds … you practically needed a math degree to play original D&D.” p
top to bottom: Haskell Natural 1’s Gaming Club has a room to itself inside The Dragon’s Hoard D.J. Cooper instructs longtime gamer Scott Freeman on the rules and intricacies of a new game Friends can sit, eat and play for hours without any distractions
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CASA - THIRD ANNUAL WINDS ACROSS THE PRAIRIE photos by Jeff Burkhead
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NEWS [MAKERS] & PEOPLE ON THE MOVE PINE LANDSCAPE CENTER Receives Woman Business Enterprise (WBE) Certification & Named Kansas Women’s Business of the Year Supplier/Distributor Firm
Pine Landscape Center is proud to announce that it is officially certified as a Woman Business Enterprise (WBE) by the State of Kansas, Office of Minority and Women Business Development. In addition, Pine Landscape Center has been named Kansas Women’s Business of the Year Supplier/Distributor Firm by the Kansas Department of Commerce. “Being recognized as a WBE presents an exceptional opportunity to enhance our offerings for current partners and customers while exploring new avenues for future expansion,” stated Kathy Pine, Owner of Pine Landscape Center. “I am excited to have achieved this designation and look forward to propelling Pine Landscape Center to greater heights as a member of the WBE community.”
THE TRUST COMPANY OF KANSAS Welcomes Joan M. Bowen as Vice President & Trust Officer
Joan Bowen, Vice President & Trust Officer, has joined The Trust Company of Kansas’ Lawrence office. Joan is an accomplished attorney with experience in several practice areas, including estate planning, probate law, estate and gift taxation, and business law. She has also served as Adjunct Faculty for both Newman and Friends University, teaching classes such as Kansas Estate Administration, Legal Assistant Computer Skills, and Masters Research Project. Joan earned her Bachelor’s Degree and Juris Doctor from the University of Kansas. In this role, Joan will foster new and existing relationships with clients in our Lawrence market.
CAPITOL FEDERAL® Celebrates Groundbreaking of New Free State Branch in Lawarence, Kansas
Capitol Federal® celebrated the beginning of construction for its newest full-service branch in Lawrence, KS with a groundbreaking ceremony at the new CapFed® branch location, 4431 Bauer Farm Drive in Lawrence. CEO John B. Dicus said, “We are excited about this new milestone in our rich history in the Lawrence community. CapFed is dedicated to our customers and communities, and we are eagerly awaiting the opportunity to serve our Lawrence customers at our new Free State branch in 2024.”
ENVISTA - Delivers Surprise Check Donations Totaling $4,501 to 21 Lawrence Schools
Envista Federal Credit Union is kicking off International Credit Union Week, October 16-20, introducing a "Roots of Kindness" campaign. Envista’s dedication extends far beyond the realm of traditional banking, as they are passionate about nurturing the community and fostering a ripple effect of kindness. Envista has been actively cultivating a culture of kindness, and to start the celebration, they had the pleasure of surprising 21 Lawrence schools with a check donation.
STEVENS & BRAND, LLP Announces Merger with Newbery, Ungerer & Hickert LLP
The law firms of Stevens & Brand, LLP and Newbery, Ungerer & Hickert, LLP are pleased to announce their merger, creating an expanded Topeka office of Stevens & Brand, LLP. Since 1994, Newbery, Ungerer & Hickert, LLP has provided expertise in tax and estate planning, trust and estate administration, probate, business law, real estate law and mediation. Stevens & Brand, LLP offers a wide range of legal services with 30 attorneys across more than 40 areas of law and a history dating back to 1925, with offices in Topeka and Lawrence. 78
NEWS [MAKERS] & PEOPLE ON THE MOVE HEARTLAND COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTER Receives both Kansas Fights Addiction Grants
Heartland Community Health Center, a Federally Qualified Community Health Center (FQHC), serving 20 rural and urban counties in Northeastern Kansas announces the receipt of two substantial grants from the Kansas Fights Addiction program, totaling $400,000 from the Sunflower Foundation. The grant funding is aimed at preventing, reducing, treating, or otherwise abating or remediating substance abuse or addiction These grants will significantly bolster the organization's commitment to addressing addiction within our community, with one grant specifically designated for addiction treatment and the other for addiction prevention.
Douglas County Community Foundation Supports SparkWheel
SparkWheel is pleased to announce it has received a $4,000 Momentum Grant from the Douglas County Community Foundation. Funding from this grant will support the students that SparkWheel is currently serving at Prairie Park Elementary School. Momentum Grants fuel projects and programs that help people in Douglas County who face poverty build momentum as they take steps to reach their potential and positively impact the community. SparkWheel is passionate about providing students with the tools and resources they need to succeed academically. The funding from this Momentum Grant will be directed towards program materials, a cornerstone of the group’s initiatives. Program materials encompass a wide range of resources, including textbooks, learning aids, and interactive tools that foster a love for learning and nurture academic growth. These materials play a pivotal role in creating engaging and effective learning environments for the students SparkWheel serves.
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“Whenever Peaslee Tech is mentioned in the Lawrence Business Magazine, and anytime we are guests on The Lawrence Business Magazine Radio Show, we get so much positive feedback from their readers and listeners. They boost the awareness we need to help create careers for those in the trade industry and provide businesses with qualified workers.” Dr. Kevin Kelley, Chief Executive Officer, Peaslee Tech “Express Professionals started advertising in the Lawrence Business Magazine over ten years ago. This was one of the best advertising moves we have made. It is continuous exposure to all our clients and potential clients we need to get in front of. The team at LBM is top notch to work with. Thanks LBM for being a great asset to the Lawrence community!” Kate Chinn, Owner, Express Employment Professionals Lorem Ipsum
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