James Patterson
Down to a Science by James Patterson photo by Stephanie Diani
Just last month, Donna Strickland became the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, nearly sixty years after Maria Goeppert Mayer. And in 1903, sixty years prior to Goeppert Mayer’s win, Marie Curie became the first ever woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. You can do the math—that’s only three women in nearly 120 years to win an award given out annually! While female scientists have come a long way over the past century (engineer Frances H. Arnold also won the Nobel this year for chemistry), there’s overwhelming evidence that women remain underrepresented in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math. 10
Story Monsters Ink | November 2018 | StoryMonsters.com
That’s the exact reason I created the character of Maxine “Max” Einstein in my new middle-grade series, Max Einstein: The Genius Experiment. And that’s why I really believe Max Einstein is the most important book I’ve ever done. When the managers of the Albert Einstein Archives, located at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, approached me a while back saying they’d like me to create books that will introduce kids to Einstein’s science, I insisted that the protagonist be a girl. They were very bright—no surprise—and were on board. They also said the books must be entertaining to make a difference, because otherwise young readers won’t pay any attention to them.
