Nonstandard Notebook: Mathematically Ruled Pages for Unruly Thoughts

A revolutionary notebook that challenges us to play outside (and with) the lines.

A standard notebook displays page after page of horizontal lines. But what if we break the pattern? What if the ruled pages grew unruly? In this Nonstandard Notebook, lines twist, fragment, curve, and crisscross in beautiful formations. Each sheet is a distinctive work of imagination, asking us to draw, doodle, and journal in the same spirit.

Page after page, as we journey from lines to parabolas to waves, deep questions arise—about form, art, and mathematics. How do we harness the infinite? Why do patterns permeate nature? What are the limitations and possibilities of human vision? Nonstandard Notebook explores these questions and more through its provocative and inspirational images, each displayed with the mathematics that generated it. We see how straight lines can form fractal crenellations, how circles can disrupt and unify, and how waves and scaling can form complex landscapes (or even famous faces). Created by mathematicians, educators, and math popularizers Tim Chartier and Amy Langville, and with a foreword from Ben Orlin (bestselling author of Math with Bad Drawings), Nonstandard Notebook shows that rules—both the rules of mathematics and the rules of a notebook—do not mark the end of creativity, but the beginning.

Tim Chartier is the Joseph R. Morton Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Davidson College. He has fielded analytics questions from ESPN, the New York Times, the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and teams in the NBA, NFL, and NASCAR. Among his numerous books, he is the author of Math Bytes: Google Bombs, Chocolate-Covered Pi, and Other Cool Bits in Computing.

Amy Langville is professor of mathematics at the College of Charleston. Her books include Google’s PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings, Who’s #1: The Science of Rating and Ranking, and the Deconstruct Calculus Series. She is also a frequent consultant on applied mathematics projects.