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

by Richard Evan Schwartz

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.

Kindle Edition

First published April 22, 2015

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 PhD in math from Princeton, and is currently the Chancellor's Professor of Mathematics at Brown University. His research interests lie in geometry 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, a Clay Research Scholar in 2009, and Simons Fellow in 2012. He is the author of a number of books, including Spherical CR Geometry and Dehn Surgery, Outer Billiards on Kites, You Can Count on Monsters, Man Versus Dog, Unnecessary Surgery, and The Extra Toaster. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Barrington, Rhode Island. In his spare time, he listens to music, writes comic books, cycles on the bike path near his house, walks on the beach, or spends time with his family.

Reviews

[Justin · Rating 1 out of 5]

This so-called children's book is a shoddy, poor, lacklustre attempt at prose. Although I don't doubt Schwartz's maths abilities, it seems that Schwartz has had minimal experience actually writing for kids. The writing isn't engaging or coherent, and it certainly would not make the maths-ambivalent (and certainly not the maths-hesitant) child into being attracted to the discipline.

And while sometimes in juvenile belles-lettres, poor prose can be compensated for by good illustrations, one can hardly say that about this work. The "drawings" are crude geometric figures that are hardly inspiring.

Though I know I'm in the minority as this book has been highly praised, I can only say that this is perhaps because this book appeals to those who already find maths appealing—it sings to the choir, so to speak.