5 Sides of Marjorie Rice : How to Discover a Shape

"Writing with a storyteller’s flair, Alznauer captures her audience’s attention with colorful phrases and interesting facts." —Booklist (starred review)

Ablaze with pattern and color, this ebullient picture book biography celebrates the intersection of art and science—through the life and lens of an extraordinary amateur mathematician.

When Marjorie Rice was a little girl in Roseburg, Oregon, in the 1930s, she saw patterns everywhere. Swimming in the river, her body was a shape in the water, the water a shape in the hills, the hills a shape in the sky. Some shapes, fitted into a rectangle or floor tilings, were so beautiful they made her long to be an artist. Marjorie dreamed of studying art and geometry, perhaps even solving the age-old “problem of five” (why pentagons don’t fit together the way shapes with three, four, or six sides do). But when college wasn’t possible, she pondered and explored all through secretarial school, marriage, and parenting five children, until one day, while reading her son’s copy of Scientific American, she learned that a subscriber had discovered a pentagon never seen before. If a reader could do it, couldn’t she? Marjorie studied all the known pentagons, drew a little five-sided house, and kept pondering. She’d done it! And she’d go on to discover more pentagonal tilings and whole new classes of tessellations. In this visually wondrous tribute, Anna Bron’s intricate art teems with patterns, including nods to M. C. Escher, and radiates the thrill of one woman’s discovery, playfully inviting readers to approach geometry through art—and art through geometry. Back matter offers more on the story of five and suggestions on how to discover a shape.

Amy Alznauer is the author of The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity: A Tale of the Genius Ramanujan, illustrated by Daniel Miyares, and Flying Paintings: The Zhou Brothers: A Story of Revolution and Art, illustrated by ShanZuo Zhou and DaHuang Zhou. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh and an MS in mathematics from the University of Illinois. Her adult epistolary memoir Love and Salt won a Christopher Award, and she is on the mathematics faculty at Northwestern University. She lives in Chicago.

Anna Bron is the illustrator of No Horses in the House! The Audacious Life of Artist Rosa Bonheur by Mireille Messier and other acclaimed picture books, as well as an animation director who has worked on Emmy and Oscar–nominated short films, commercials, and various other projects. She lives in British Columbia.