Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci - Hardcover

D'Agnese, Joseph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805063056 ISBN 13: 9780805063059

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR), 2010

Synopsis

Breaking News: In April 2015 Blockhead was named a Mathical Honor Book.

 
As a young boy in medieval Italy, Leonardo Fibonacci thought about numbers day and night. He was such a daydreamer that people called him a blockhead.

When Leonardo grew up and traveled the world, he was inspired by the numbers used in different countries. Then he realized that many things in nature, from the number of petals on a flower to the spiral of a nautilus shell, seem to follow a certain pattern. 

The boy who was once teased for being a blockhead had discovered what came to be known as the Fibonacci Sequence!
 

Blockhead is a 2011 Bank Street College -- Best Children's Book of the Year.

Blockhead has been translated into Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Catalan. Be sure to check for those editions of this title, if appropriate for your classroom!

About this title

About the Authors

Joseph D’Agnese is a writer and journalist who lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Though he writes about the Middle Ages, he considers himself a Renaissance man. He is the author of Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci.

JOHN O'BRIEN is lieutenant lifeguard on the Jersey shore and has been dedicated to beaches and beach safety for the past thirty-five years. The illustrator of many popular children's books-including This Is Baseball, This Is Figure Skating, and This Is Soccer-he divides his time between the Jersey shore and Miami, Florida.

Reviews

Grade 2–5—Leonardo does his math problems so quickly that he has plenty of time to look out the window and count other things in nature. His teacher, however, chastises him for daydreaming and the other students call him a "blockhead." Only his father's advisor, Alfredo, understands that Leonardo has a fascination with numbers, a love that will eventually help him become the "greatest Western mathematician in the Middle Ages." As an adult, Fibonacci imagines the figure of Alfredo continuing to help him refine his theories. Although the book is presented as a biography, the author states that "little is known about the life of…Leonardo Fibonacci" and no sources are listed. Entertaining in the vein of the "You Wouldn't Want to Be" series, this lighthearted introduction to Fibonacci's ideas will inspire young math lovers and perhaps point them toward more scholarly explorations. The illustrations have a medieval look to them but without any stiffness or fussiness. They include many touches of humor and are well suited to the story. Painted with a broad pointillist style detailed with pen and ink, the pictures incorporate many visual references to Fibonacci's work, such as swirling features suggestive of the spiral, a key element in the mathematician's theories of nature.—Lucinda Snyder Whitehurst, St. Christopher's School, Richmond, VA
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Though written in a modern idiom (“‘Yuck,’ I thought. ‘Who wants to be a merchant?’”), D’Agnese’s introduction to medieval Europe’s greatest mathematician offers both a coherent biographical account—spun, with some invented details, from very sketchy historical records—and the clearest explanation to date for younger readers of the numerical sequence that is found throughout nature and still bears his name. O’Brien’s illustrations place the prosperously dressed, woolly headed savant in his native Pisa and other settings, contemplating flowers, seashells, and the so-called arabic numerals (which he promoted vigorously and rightly ascribes to India), as well as presenting a visual solution to his most famous mathematical word problem. Closing with a page of relevant activities for young naturalists, this picture book makes an excellent alternative to Joy N. Hulme’s colorful but flawed Wild Fibonacci: Nature’s Secret Code Revealed, illustrated by Carol Schwartz (2005). Grades 3-5. --John Peters

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805063056
• ISBN 13: 9780805063059
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: O'Brien John
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 40