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

Schwartz, Richard Evan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1568815786 ISBN 13: 9781568815787

Publisher: A K Peters/CRC Press, 2010

Synopsis

Using a unique teaching tool designed to motivate kids to learn, 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.

CRC Press Author and NPR's Math Guy Keith Devlin spoke with Scott Simon about how the book makes finding prime numbers fun.

"This is one of the most amazing math books for kids I have ever seen...," Devlin says. "Great colors, it's wonderful, and yet because [Schwartz] knows the mathematics, he very skillfully and subtly embeds mathematical ideas into the drawings."

About this title

About the Author

Richard Schwartz grew up in Los Angeles. He wore only blue clothes between the ages of 7 and 11. He spent his youth obsessively playing tennis until video games distracted him. He majored in math at UCLA, got a Ph.D in math from Princeton and is currently a professor at Brown University, with research interests in geometry, topology, and dynamics.He likes to do mathematical experiments on the computer and then find proofs for the results he discovers. Rich was an Invited Speaker at the 2002 International Congress of Mathematicians, a Guggenheim Fellow in 2003, and a Clay Research Scholar in 2009. He is the author of a number of books, including Spherical CR Geometry and Dehn Surgery, Outer Billiards on Kites, Man Versus Dog, and The Extra Toaster, among others. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Barrington, Rhode Island. In his spare time, he listens to music, writes comic books, thinks about future technologies, cycles on the bike path near his house, walks on the beach, or plays with his children.

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: A K Peters/CRC Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1568815786
• ISBN 13: 9781568815787
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 244