You Can Count on Monsters The First 100 Numbers and Their Characters Richard Evan Schwartz
A visual exploration of the concepts of factoring and the role of prime and composite numbers, this book’s unusual approach intrigues and engages adults and children alike.
Monsters Make All the Difference The playful and colorful monsters 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 adults 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. The simple yet unique design and concept are just a few of the features that have pushed the book into the top ten on Amazon’s list of bestselling books for children.
Praise for You Can Count on Monsters: National Public Radio’s Math Guy Keith Devlin calls this book “…
25 K007 8-7 g no. 57 Catalo -1-56881- ftcover 8 So 7 ., 9 p : p ISBN 10, 244 9 .9 0 5 2 £1 ry Janua $24.95 /
one of the most amazing math books for kids I have ever seen … Great colors, it's wonderful, and yet because [Schwartz] knows the mathematics, he very skillfully and subtly embeds mathematical ideas into the drawings … The technologies that kids have are so captivating, so engaging, that a dull old textbook — the kind of book that I learned from — doesn't hold their attention any more. You need to make it attractive, and this book does that in spades.” Thomas Banchoff, former Mathematical Association of America (MAA) President: “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 … She's going to take the book to her second grade class. Every school library should have one.” MAA Reviews: “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 … The whole thing is a lot of fun” Publishers Weekly: “This compact, innovative book counts to 100 using prime numbers represented as monsters, each with identifying characteristics … for creative learners, visualizing the roles each monster plays may lead to deeper number sense. Ages 4-8.”
ning Award Win
!
Best of Category for juvenile books at Bookbuilder's 53rd Annual New England Book Show. Judges praised the book's freshness, beautiful illustrations, and unique way of looking at numbers, and called it “a book for kids and parents.” Richard Schwartz is currently a professor at Brown University, with research interests in geometry, topology, and dynamics. 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.
w w w . c r c p r e s s . c o m