Explain this
You Can Count on Monsters: The First 100 Numbers and Their Characters
How the publisher describes it:
“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.”
Review by Peter Hall
In brief:
The book is strangely addictive and I have found myself in the past week looking up numbers just to see what happens.
“This book is a really beautiful one and will be enjoyed by mathematicians of all ages”
As a parent of a 5 year old, and an AST doing some outreach work in primary schools I was very interested to see this book. My initial impression was one of beauty. This is a compact, almost square book, with black pages with bright colourful pictures. The concept is beautifully simple as well. The book lists the numbers from 1 to 100, each gaining a double page spread. The left hand page shows the number, and the matching number of dots — grouped in a logical fashion — so 25 shows 5 groups of 5 dots, whilst 26 shows 2 groups of 13 dots. The right hand page shows the prime factorisation of each number — with each prime number shown by a “monster”. The number 2 is shown by a buy with two big eyes, three is a triangular monster — and so 6 is shown as these monsters together. 12 is shown as two of the 2 monster and one of the three monster — but by now the monsters are distorted a little to give the reader the fun of realising what monsters are actually present. I should add that the left hand page shows the prime factor tree — drawn working up the page, so 12 is split into 3 and 4 and then the 4 into 2 and 2.
The book is strangely addictive and I have found myself in the past week looking up numbers just to see what happens. Even though I know the prime factorisations (or can easily work them out) I’m still interested to see how the author has designed each page. So 64 is a nice collection of six of the 2-monsters joined together.
I don’t know how much interest this would hold for younger students — and I wonder whether a poster version of the book would have more interest — and perhaps be more exciting to look at. As a mathematician I’d quite like to see some of the factor trees started in different ways to yield the same answers, for me one of the joys of prime factors is that ones initial choice of factorisation makes no difference to the final prime factorisation — something I find my students are oddly surprised by.
I look forward to sharing this properly with my son in a couple of years time. I think small children will be grabbed by the mathematics monsters — I really like the idea of thinking about prime numbers as unique monsters and I’m sure he will as well.
In addition to the numbers 1-100 the book gives a beautifully clear explanation of how to draw factor trees (though I would usually work down the page, maybe I’m producing factor roots?) and concludes with a nicely presented explanation of the infinite number of prime numbers.
In short — this book is a really beautiful one and will be enjoyed by mathematicians of all ages — even if the younger ones get more excited by the monsters!
Peter Hall • AST Mathematics, Imberhorne School, East Grinstead
You Can Count on Monsters
The First 100 Numbers and Their Characters
Richard Evan Schwartz
2010 CRC Press
ISBN 978-1-56881-578-7
