Who am I?

My name is Daniel Fleisher. I am called “Dan” these two decades for it was decided on High that my high school friends should refer to me as such. I don’t like it, but it stuck.

I was a mathematician for some time. Graduate school, postdoc, that stuff. Spouse-trailed to Chicago from Rehovot and failed to find a suitable academic position. (As it turns out: there are none too many departments looking for algebraists specializing in vertex and Kac-Moody algebras and how to use their twisted representations to construct and analyze infinite hierarchies of nested partial differential equations, each of which yields soliton solutions. I did offer to teach, but that’s what slaves are for.)

What a boon that was. I “pivoted,” I think is the recent slang—no one sticks to a single job or profession anymore; I hoped to avoid this trend but, alas (not alas)—to sofrus (safrut), which is, best translated into English, “sacred calligraphy.” Basically, I learned how to write, check, and fix the three(ish) primary ritual objects in Judaism: sifrei torah (the big scrolls), mezuzos (the things on the doors), and tefillin (the black boxes men wear in the morning). The details of all of these are governed by a gargantuan and complex set of laws, many of which are disputed by various legal authorities. Enough of that, though.

Learning sofrus, though, taught me control. It taught me how to control my hand, how ink moves and flows and dries, how to put onto paper (parchment, in the case of sofrus) exactly what I want to. One evening in the winter of 2020, this took hold of me and what you see here is the (ongoing) result.

My primary artistic interests are informed by a number of things:

1. Calligraphy and, in particular, Hebrew and Aramaic (and other abjads, maybe abugidas, etc.) calligraphy. I do actually still do calligraphy, but primarily for (personal) liturgical use. I suppose I take commissions.

2. Mathematical physics and, in particular, the increasingly ubiquitous intersection (or union) of hyperuniformity, stochasticity, scale (or conformal) invariance, phase transitions, self-organizing criticality, quasiperiodicity, noisy and fuzzy systems, and all the weird weird weird stuff going on when you can trick ultra-thin materials into believing that there are only two spatial dimensions.

3. Jewish mysticism and, in particular, chasidic “philosophy” (i.e. chasidus), seder hishtalshelus, gilgulim (but not in the way you might think), זנביה בפומיה …

My time at present (August, 2024) is split between a number of projects, both real and largely imagined. What appears on this website is what I am able to produce in the hour or two allowed me in the evenings, after the choir of screaming children (1, 3, and 6 years old) has quieted and it is one of the uncommon times when my soul has not been absolutely drained. I teach (starting this fall) mathematics at a local school. I (currently, and full-time since the summer of 2018) am the primary care-giver to for? with? as?) our three aforementioned children. I bind books, learn Torah (current obsession: any and all things written by R Tzvi Elimelech MeDinov—the Bnei Yissoschor), learn physics (QCD at present), and monitor my ever-erratic health. 

Enough about me:

I am not a man, but a worm. My heart is void within.