You Can Count on Monsters: The First 100 Numbers and Their Characters - Softcover

Richard Evan Schwartz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1470422093 ISBN 13: 9781470422097

Publisher: American Mathematical Society, 2015

Synopsis

This book is a unique teaching tool that takes math lovers on a journey designed to motivate kids (and kids at heart) to learn the fun of factoring and prime numbers. This volume visually explores the concepts of factoring and the role of prime and composite numbers. The playful and colorful monsters are designed to give children (and even older audiences) an intuitive understanding of the building blocks of numbers and the basics of multiplication. The introduction and appendices can also help adult readers answer questions about factoring from their young audience. The artwork is crisp and creative and the colors are bright and engaging, making this volume a welcome deviation from standard math texts. Any person, regardless of age, can profit from reading this book. Readers will find themselves returning to its pages for a very long time, continually learning from and getting to know the monsters as their knowledge expands. You Can Count on Monsters is a magnificent addition for any math education program and is enthusiastically recommended to every teacher, parent and grandparent, student, child, or other individual interested in exploring the visually fascinating world of the numbers 1 through 100.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Evan Schwartz, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA.

Review

This delightful book is the result of the author's desire to teach his daughters about primes and factorization. Apart from an introduction and some explanatory material in the back, it consists of one hundred double pages: on the left page is a number and that many dots, arranged into clusters that display its factorization. On the right page is a picture that represents the same information using the author's 'monsters,' which represent the prime numbers. --MAA
This compact, innovative book counts to 100 using prime numbers represented as monsters, each with identifying characteristics (two resembles a bee with two buggy eyes, and three is an angry-looking triangular creature). The book opens with explanations of multiplication, prime and composite numbers, and factor trees, then moves on to a list of numbers. Each prime number looks unique, while composite numbers are represented by scenes involving their prime monsters (eight is illustrated as three of the beelike twos, i.e., two times two times two. Readers may have difficulty deciphering the pictures, which come to resemble little works of abstract geometric art. But especially for creative learners, visualizing the roles each monster plays may lead to deeper number sense. Ages 4 to 8. --Publishers Weekly

My eight-year old granddaughter Natalie is just learning about multiplication and as we read through almost the whole book, she especially liked the 'special numbers' (primes) where a new shape appeared. At one point she paused and said, 'You never get two special numbers one right after the other.' I gave positive reinforcement for this, her first mathematical conjecture (not mentioning the one counterexample of 2 and 3). She's going to take the book to her second grade class. Every school library should have one. --Thomas Banchoff, former MAA President

Edition details

• Publisher: American Mathematical Society
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1470422093
• ISBN 13: 9781470422097
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 242