PBS Teachers™
Math
recommended books archive
Published: August 2004
Financial markets are even riskier than past theory predicts. Mathematician Mandelbrot employs fractal models to understand stock prices, commodities trading, and currency exchange rates. He assesses the old theory, describes the new, and looks to the future.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2001
Although China has many different spoken dialects, its written language is standard. This book introduces some of the simpler picture-words based on actions using the hands and feet. Each two-page spread features a phrase in English and Chinese writing and a cut-paper collage resembling a block print. The numbers 1-10 and the verb "go" are also included.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2004
Count from one to ten and back again in this playful rhyming picture book. McCully’s illustrations supply humor and interest. Readers and listeners can search for a pair of tagalong mice on each page.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2005
A box of ten rubber ducks is washed overboard in a storm. One by one they drift apart until the last finds companionship with a real mother duck and her nine ducklings. Children can count, meet common ocean animals, learn the cardinal points of the compass, and make the rubber duck squeak.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2000
Jessica is a worrier. She worries about losing her first tooth, missing the school bus, and getting her math right. When her teacher asks each student to bring in a collection of 100 objects on the 100th day of school, she worries about what to bring in. Children 4-8 will learn different ways of counting to 100 as Jessica's classmates bring in their collections and just might recognize the solution to her problem before she does.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 2006
On the first of the year, a box with a penguin is delivered. Inside is a note: “I’m number 1. Feed me when I’m hungry.” The pattern is well established by the end of the week with the arrival of number 7. Who is sending the penguins, and why? You’ll discover the identity of the sender and the reason why he’s mailing penguins at year’s end. In the meantime, you’ll have fun calculating penguin totals and seeing how they can be arranged in easily counted groups. The surprise ending promises an unbearable New Year.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: 2003
The lessons gathered in this resource were chosen from the author’s Math Solutions Newsletter. Math teachers can find lessons in number, geometry, measurement, statistics, probability, algebra, logic, and patterns and functions. The book includes grade level and strand charts and black line masters.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2006
Here’s a good way to sharpen your critical thinking skills. This book presents 37 sets of questions covering number series, analogies, logic problems, logic games, analyzing arguments, and more. The book is designed to be used independently or in the classroom. The answers and explanations are grouped at the end of the book.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 1998
Young adult readers will love these engaging, brain-teasing math problems and will strengthen their math skills as they puzzle through to the solutions.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2002
Wilson Williams is having trouble learning his times tables. He wishes he were smarter. His parents try to help, but practicing isn’t as much fun as playing. When he fails his 3s again, Wilson’s teacher sends home a note, and Wilson can only see weeks of trouble ahead.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2003
Niels Hendrik Abel was twenty-one in 1824 when he published a pamphlet which proved that fifth order algebraic equations are not solvable in radicals. At the time, his paper was largely ignored, and Abel died five years later, just before his work began to attract attention. His insights have since become a cornerstone of modern mathematics. This is a book of mathematical ideas reaching back to the Ancient Greeks. It highlights mathematical details in boxes and includes an annotated translation of Abel’s proof.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2004
The author presents all the well-known chessboard problems in a manner accessible to those not necessarily versed in math or chess. Chapters treat the Knight’s Tour, Queen’s Domination, three dimensional chessboards, Eulerian squares, and Polyminoes. Each chapter includes problems and solutions.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2004
How big is giant squid? How small is a pygmy shrew? Sometimes numbers aren’t enough to make size clear. Jenkins’s cut and torn paper collages are one and two page illustrations of animals, or in the case of the very very big, parts of animals. Opening this book to the double-page full-size Goliath Birdeater Tarantula (12 inches across) might cause you to reach for something larger than a flyswatter.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2004
In one hundred chapters of no more than two pages, the author who has a PhD in mathematics and works as a stand-up comedian and DJ in Australia takes the “numb out of numbers.” Each engaging chapter from 1 to 100 is filled with factoids, interesting observations, and humor. Some discretion is advised with younger students.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 1999
Zalavsky's account of the diverse mathematical systems of Saharan African cultures includes counting in words and in gestures; measuring time, distance, weight, and other quantities; patterns in music, poetry, art, and architecture; number magic and taboos, and much more.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2003
"It's not that I' so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer," said Einstein. OK, he was smart too, but persistence is an essential characteristic in those who persue mathematics and science. This brief biography features many photos and illustrations and includes a timeline.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2003
What can happen in one hour? Start with a mouse and a cat at 6 A.M. and see. That’s what Crummel and Donohue have done in this wonderful cut paper collage odyssey. Each two-page spread follows the action at irregular increments of time through the hour and ends on a note suggesting the adventures will soon start again.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2006
Each letter's page pictures a number of things beginning with the letter. As the author explains, a “thing” can be an object, action, or color. Consult “How to Play” for other fine points on what to count and what not to count. The pictures will keep you counting and recounting. The author’s answers are given at the end, but even he expresses some uncertainty. If you find more, he’s provided an email address.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 1998
The authors who brought you the highly acclaimed Amazing Pop-Up Grammar Book have done it again! Readers in grades 3-6 will love the elaborate illustrations that slide and pop-up to reveal math questions and answers. The book is organized by the numbers 1-10; each number provides practice on a specific part of the multiplication table through scenarios like Noah's Ark, finding clothes in drawers and closets, and much more.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 1999
Inside a richly illustrated, mysterious jar is water, which becomes the sea; inside the sea, readers age 4-8 discover an island, and so on until the concept of factorials is elegantly and invitingly explained and readers have counted to 3,628,800.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2001
Originally published in 1884, Flatland tells the story of A. Square, a plane figure, taken to a land of three dimensions. Stewart, a mathematics professor, has annotated this math classic, revealing much of the history and science underlying Abbott’s book, subjects as diverse as phrenology, ancient Babylon, Karl Marx, the Gregorian calendar, and the mathematician George Boole. Ample margins provide details, references, and explanatory drawings. The book ends with an essay on the fourth dimension in mathematics and bibliographies of Abbott and Charles Howard Hinton.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2002
Pallotta has written a number of math books using candy to illustrate concepts. In this book he uses apples, which should please dentists, to explain fractions. Bolster's elves divide realistic McIntoshes, Galas, and Cortlands into equal parts to feed two, three, and four persons, then other fruit related props like bees, pears, and glasses of juice to demonstrate other fractions, numerators, denominators, and improper fractions. As always, humor helps make ideas clear as well as add fun.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2000
This is just the book for the whole family on that long car trip or flight. Divided in two sections, the first has 75 warm-up puzzles and the second 75 killers. Each section is followed by answers and explanations for approaching the problems. Open the book and watch time fly. Some puzzles require pencil and paper.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2002
Kids will have fun using basic math skills to solve the eighteen riddles in this picture book. Skills exercised include addition, subtraction, time, speed, measurement, multiplication, and common sense.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2003
This readable discussion traces the concept of infinity from Pythagoras to Descarte to Leibnitz to Cantor and other less familiar mathematical figures. The text is accompanied by many charts, graphs, drawings. A generous appendix presents the mathematics in greater detail.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2006
This is one of those stories that puts a human face on mathematics. Nicholas Bourbaki was not one but initially six mathematicians. He was born in a Paris café in 1934. The six mathematicians and the others who followed published in his name-- inventing the man, his family, and artifacts like calling cards and wedding invitations to his daughter’s wedding. It was an elaborate hoax, but one that produced world-class mathematics. Bourbaki’s work has influenced all mathematicians working today.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2003
This variation on a familiar song lets children count umbrella-toting aunts in ranks of one to ten as they slosh through the rain to the beat of a drummer girl. When thunder booms, they all race home. Manning’s illustrations include interesting details, diversity of characters, and humor.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 1998
Saul helps very young readers learn to count with this fun barnyard tale. The barn cat is joined by different farm animals in a counting story richly illustrated with woodcuts.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2004
If you like baseball and statistics, you’re in luck. This city phone book size tome includes player stats and performance analysis for more than 1600 National and American league players. It includes best and worst catchers and the top 50 prospects.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2004
Little Runt shares an itchy bed of straw in Sooey, South Dakota with five other family members. Little Runt is squashed and unhappy so he eliminates one bed hog after another. Kids count backward from six to one. This humorous tale of subtraction is told in verse.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2006
The French Mathematician Maupertuis argued that everything in nature happens in a way that requires the least possible action. His least action principle or the concept of optimization has influenced mathematics, biology, economics, and politics. The author traces how optimization led to great intellectual breakthroughs.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2002
Rote memorization of the multiplication tables isn't the only way to conquer multiplication. In this approach, Tang shows how to combine what you do know to arrive at what you don't know. Instead of memorizing, for example, 7x5=35, think of 7x5 as being half 7x10. The book's final pages include the times tables and Tang's rules restated.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2005
Puzzles are a good way to clear the cobwebs from your brain. Einstein used to solve them. This collection of more than 200 exercises covers logical and numerical puzzles, tangrams, sequencing, estimation, and magic squares as well as lateral thinking, optical illusions, and letter puzzles.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2001
Forbes ASAP is a bimonthly technology magazine. Big Issues is a collection of 66 essays from the first five years, examining the impact of digital technology on society, culture, and individuals. Writers encountered are as diverse as Muhammad Ali and Bill Gates, John Updike and Chuck Yeager. This is probably best used as a source book for teachers, as some of the issues are controversial.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2002
The modern game of Go is played on a board with 19x19 lines (361 points) with 181 black and 180 white stones. Although often associated with Japan, the game of Go originated in China at least before A.D. 200. The rules to Go are simple, but it is one of those games of strategy that is harder to master than its rules first suggest. This spiral-bound introduction teaches a simplified version of the game in which the first person to capture an opponent's marker wins before presenting the full game. The book comes with 9x9 and 13x13 boards and pieces to play.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2002
Challenge your brain with the twenty-one tests gathered in this spiral-bound book. Each test has fifteen questions involving anagrams, analogies, cryptograms, logic, mathematics, mazes, sequences, words, and more. The answers follow each test. An index makes it easy to find specific questions and puzzle types.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2004
Test your puzzler with this generous collection of brightly colored visual and number teasers. Stumped? A yellow section provides tips for arriving at a solution. Answers are in the final lavender section. Included is a section of optical illustions.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2002
Certainty has become a commodity marketed by the medical industry, insurance companies, investment advisors, and election campaigns. Certainty is an illusion. Even DNA evidence can produce false matches. We don’t understand this because we haven’t learned statistical thinking, a handicap that hobbles doctors and lawyers as well as anyone else. This book will help you understand uncertainty and the real world.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2002
Sometimes all a student needs is to see a problem from a different angle to make sense of it. This book provides plenty of supplementary views in calculus. Chapters provide the foundations of calculus, applications of the derivative, the integral, indeterminate forms, transcendental functions, methods of integration, and applications of the integral. Solutions to the chapter exercises and a final exam are included.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2001
This brief book will not replace a calculus textbook but will provide additional explanation of concepts if read before or while using one. Readers will find no exercises. They will find verbal discussions of basic ideas, vocabulary, differential calculus, and integral calculus. Humor and vivid imagery make this a useful text for anyone with doubts about their understanding of calculus.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2005
Dunham examines in 14 concise chapters some of the mathematicians and theorems that have contributed to the development of calculus. The author warns that this is not a book for the mathematically faint-hearted.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2007
This 700+ page resource was developed for motivated students who want to improve their understanding of calculus. It can be used as a companion to any single-variable textbook. It has 475 examples from easy to hard and emphasizes improving problem solving skills.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2006
Reluctant to publish his calculus, Newton circulated his ideas privately for ten years until Leibniz published his own. If you think mathematicians are always rational, this look at the ten year feud over priority between two giants will open your eyes.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 2004
Originally published in 1999 and now available in paperback, this counting book encourages children to count objects in Japanese, Russian, Korean, Hindi, Hebrew, Chinese, French, Tagalog, Spanish, and Zulu. Pronunciation help is provided. A world map shows where each language is spoken.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2000
If you had as much money as Bill Gates in dollar bills, how much room would you need to store it? What if you owed $5.7 trillion? (U.S. national debt). This picture book for children 4-8 provides comprehensible images of smaller numbers and builds with them to provide memorable images of really big numbers. What about a googol? If you counted all the atoms in the universe, you still wouldn't reach a googol.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2002
Counting, number sense, shape recognition, puzzles, mazes, matching - many of the elements of mathematics are present in this collection of complex and intriguing picture puzzles constructed from familiar or once familiar toys. Even after you have found what you are looking for, you will continue to search. This would make a great addition to a math activities table.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2000
If you are 9-12 and like doing math, you will want to read this book. Learn about fifteen math-grounded careers, from actuarial work to urban planning. Each entry gives a general description of an occupation, lists related websites, and provides a profile of someone who actually does the work. You will also find a list of other careers in science, health, aviation, and more, all requiring some proficiency in math. A planning section helps you work toward your dream career.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2003
This is a colorized reissue of a book first published in 1981. Fun rhymes and fun cats of every stripe, spot, and color make a Lewin’s counting book (from 1-60) a perfect read aloud for primary students.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2004
The study of probability is an attempt to understand uncertainty, the likelihood of some random event. Aczel relates the development of probability theory from Galileo, Pascal, fermat, and Moivre in a manner accessible to the general reader. He includes a section of problems for readers to test their understanding. An appendix by Brad Johnson applies theory to games of chance.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2006
Probability and statistics are tools for understanding the recurrent but unpredictable. This account of the twin disciplines traces their development form the Romans to the present. The Kaplans examine chance in gambling, insurance, normality, medicine, justice, prediction, war, and being.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: July 2007
Childhood chase games like tag, dodgeball, and hide-and-seek are an application of pursuit theory with the same principles at work as in military strategy. Nahin has written the first history of this area of mathematics, tracing modern pursuit theory from its classical beginnings to the present day and drawing on game theory, geometry, linear algebra, target-tracking algorithms, and more. He provides problems and solutions and computer programs for the really ambitious student.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2004
Numbers climb an apple tree. Count from 1 to 20 by ones, then to 90 by tens. The numbers stop at 99 when set upon by angry bumblebees but brave 0 finally joins 10 at the top of the tree to make 100. Rhyme and Ehlert’s colorful illustrations make this an especially appealing book.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: July 1999
Very young readers will enjoy the brightly illustrated pop-up scenes in five spreads; this is a solid sequel to Murphy's earlier works, including One to Ten Pop-Up Surprises! and Black Cat, White Cat: A Pop-Up Book of Opposites.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2005
Children explore the city and count 1 boy, 2 yellow cabs, 3 truck wheels, up to 10 French fries on a plate. Opposite each photograph are the numbers 1-10, a highlighted numeral, dots for children to count, and the number spelled.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2003
Cleo is an orange kitten. Kids can count things that would interest a kitten: puppies, birds, trees, and more. Count from one to ten and back down to one. Mockford's bold bright illustrations will engage young and old.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2006
What are the farm animals up to as they sneak past one sleeping farmer? The four chickens, five cows, and six goats must have something in mind. The mystery is solved when they pour the farmer’s ten goldfish in the pond.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2005
When math teachers assign homework, they often assume a parent can help if the going gets rough. But many parents need a refresher, even with elementary math. That is the purpose of this book. Math teachers and parents can help each other help their students with these 58 lessons covering whole numbers, fractions, geometry, measurement, averages, integers, and exponents.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2008
Callery covers the history of codes and ciphers from hieroglyphics to cyberspace. He looks at code-breaking devices, Native American smoke signals, flags and semaphore, Braille, Morse code, and mono- and polyalphabetic letter substitution. The book features sidebars, many illustrations, a glossary, and recommendations for further reading.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2001
Count pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, half-dollars and dollars. Determine all the ways to make 10 cents, 25 cents, 50 cents, and so on. This picture book is a great introduction to money, counting, simple addition, and problem solving.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2005
For reluctant math students discovering how mathematics underlies the universe can be the first step to a new appreciation. Could monkeys really type Hamlet? How many handshakes separate you and Thomas Jefferson? Could you take off your underpants without taking off your pants? Probability, number theory, topology, and more are presented in an accessible and enlightening manner.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2000
Take a look at the tricks colors in relation to other colors can play on our perception. This book suitable for K-12 students includes a general discussion on colors and illusion, twenty-five illusions and their explanations, four rules explaining how your brain sees things, and a glossary.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2001
This is the best of Martin Gardner’s column “Mathematical Games,” which ran for twenty-five years in Scientific American. The book is divided into twelve sections: arithmetic and algebra, plane geometry, solid geometry and higher dimension, symmetry, topology, probability, infinity, combinatories, games and decision theory, physics, logic and philosophy, and miscellaneous - making this a 700+ page ultrasaurus of recreational math.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 2005
Gardner has collected 340 short recreational math puzzles from 25 years of “Mathematical Games,” his column for Scientific American. You’ll find puzzles in combinatorics, probability, algebra, geometry, topology, chess, logic, cryptarithms, wordplay, and physics. The puzzles are grouped by subject and progress from the easiest to the hardest.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2002
Reliance on common sense is dangerous. Ignorance of math is worse. In twelve cases, Holmes uses probability, statistics, decision theory, and game theory to solve crimes. The math and logic in each case is kept at an every day level, but an afterward suggests further reading for continued investigation.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2003
Change is the norm, but there are some things that remain constant. This book looks at some of the lasting things, scientific mysteries that challenge physicists. Why, for example, do all electrons behave alike? Barrow is a professor of mathematical sciences at the University of Cambridge. In this book, he explores at the numbers and values that set reality, the strength of gravity, speed of light, and masses of elementary particles.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2004
From a half million who compete for the honor, six teens are selected to represent the U.S. at the International mathematical Olympiad. The author reveals the personalities of six remarkable problem solvers in a recent Olympiad. An appendix explains the mathematics employed in solving the contest’s six problems.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 1998
Rhyming makes counting cool in this fun book for readers K-3.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 1999
Kids learn to count down from ten to zero as Jackson's cows prepare themselves for a barn dance. Bright illustrations and whimsical description make this counting book a treat.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2005
Find and count from one to ten floral decorated animals in a garden of bright flowers. The search for the disguised creatures adds an element of fun.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2001
How many kisses does it take to say goodnight? Count and find out. Everyone pitches in and kisses baby at naptime from Grandma to the dog and cat.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2000
A child's world is full of marvelous shapes. In her latest collection of color photographs without words, Hoban focuses on four solids and shows just how common they are.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2004
Ray Kurweil traces his belief that inventions can change the world for the better to his reading of Tom Swift, Jr. For Paul Davies, theoretical physics was always his quest, even when his family thought he was nuts. Janna Levin, physicist and astronomer, remembers looking out her bedroom window at the night sky and wondering how far she was seeing. Mathematician Steven Strogatz describes an experiment with a pendulum that made clear to him the order in the universe and the importance of knowing mathematics. Steven Pinker, a psychologist, thinks tracing influences is a waste of time. Twenty-seven men and women explain their journeys into science, invention, and mathematics.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 2003
Miss Tuttle has twenty Dalmatians in her obedience class, all named Daisy. How can she tell them apart? Each has a distinguishing characteristic, skill, or possession. Kids count from one to twenty.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2004
Wiener entered college at eleven and earned his Ph. D at eighteen. He is considered the father of the Information Age. He coined the terms “cybernetics” and “feedback.” He had a long tenure at MIT. Yet he is largely forgotten. This biography traces the career and contributions of a mathematician who influenced John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Walter Reuther.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: July 2002
The author of Scientific American’s column, “Puzzling Adventures,” Shasha has collected cases organized around eight mathematical themes: design, combinatorial geometry, routing and networks, mathematical geography, scheduling, ciphers and secrecy, pattern mathematics, and games. Alternative approaches are suggested for cybernovices and cyberexperts. Solutions are furnished, though the best solutions are often still open.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2001
Dog is white with one black spot on his left ear. At least that's the way he starts his day. Soon he starts collecting additional spots: jam red, paint blue, chocolate brown. By the time he gets back home he has ten different color spots. Young readers can practice counting and naming colors.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2002
This rhyming picture book opens with one dog walking in the city, but as the title promises, he doesn’t stay alone for long. Count from one to ten and back to one as dogs enjoy a day in the city. Oller’s watercolors add humor that can be enjoyed by all ages.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2006
We often believe things because we want to believe them, not because there is any evidence. Using this observation as a starting point, the author examines six common mistakes in thinking, failures of logicn - preferring stories to statistics, failing to appreciate chance, and oversimplifying life to name half. Think of this book as a course in applied math as a life skill.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2006
The Double eagle is a twenty-dollar gold coin commissioned by Theodore Roosevelt, designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and minted in 1933. It has been one of the most sought after coins in history—and against the law to own ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt took the U.S. off the gold standard in 1933. The only coins to survive were stolen. Some were recovered. Others disappeared. One reappeared in 1996. It was recently auctioned for $7.59 million. This book is a coin collecting and detective story to please everyone.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2006
Euler still inspires mathematicians after 250 years. The author looks at applications of complex numbers in pure and applied math and electronic technology. The applications are as varied as the analysis of the flight of birds in the wind, a cat’s pursuit of a mouse, a violin’s vibrating strings, and the development of speech scramblers.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2003
This self-study book will help ease students from the concrete world of numbers to the abstract world of letters and symbols. Divided into five sections, the book examines fundamental operations, integers, real numbers, equations with variables, and algebra operations. This last section looks at word problems and real world applications.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2004
Dr. Math has been answering questions on the Web for years. This print collection provides help for geometry students. Five chapters deal with two dimensional geometric figures, area and perimeter of two dimensional figures, circles and Pi, three dimensional geometric figures, and symmetry. An illustrated appendix of geometric figures and a glossary are included.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2001
In the early 1960s when computers were largely perceived as huge threatening machines dependant on punch cards, J.C.R. Licklider saw something different. He was convinced computers would become not just super fast calculating machines but a way to empower users. Licklider envisioned a man-computer symbiosis, an intergalactic network, a global commons of the multinet. The Dream Machine covers the life of Licklider and the computer from WWII to the 1990s.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: July 2002
Published for the first time in paperback, this edition corrects errors included in the first edition. Nahin’s collection of twenty-one puzzles requires creative thinking about probability. The puzzles are posed in the first section, puzzles with intriguing titles like When idiots Duel, Who Pays for the Coffee, and the Blind Spider and the Fly. The solutions follow in the next section. Also included are sections on random number generators and MATLAB programs that simulate the puzzles.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2000
Like all good biographers, Bodanis investigates his subject's ancestors, in this case the symbols used in Einstein's equation. He then traces its development; its career in the world, including the atomic bombs dropped on Japan; and what it may still reveal about our universe. Suitable for middle schoolers and older, this book features a lengthy appendix and notes section for serious students.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2003
Einstein and Poincare set out to determine whether time was absolute or relative. Galison, professor of the history of science at Harvard University, tells of their efforts using recently uncovered photos, patents, and archives.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 1999
Although Einstein created the framework of modern physics, many prominent scientists once doubted his theories because they were too abstract to be easily understood and could not be verified in a laboratory. This biography for 9-12 year olds examines the man, his time, and his ideas.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2000
Each morning, says Emily's teacher, they will write a new number friend in their number books, and when they reach one hundred, each bring in one hundred things. No one believes they will ever reach one hundred. Children 4-8 will have fun counting objects and wondering what Emily will bring. This is a BIG book so don't try to read it in one sitting.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2005
Mouse and her friends debate the concept of equal as they try to choose sides for tug-of-war. This is a fun introduction to a big idea. An end note discusses different kinds of equality.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2005
Symmetry is the concept that links science and art. This account of a difficult equation, the quintic equation, and the two mathematicians that discovered that it could not be solved by the usual methods, describes the beginnings of group theory. Livio introduces two brilliant and tragic figures: Niels Henrik Abel who died of tuberculosis at 26 and Evariste Galois who died in a duel at 20 as he shows how group theory explains the symmetry and order we encounter everyday.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2004
Mathematics is more than arithmetic. This illustrated atlas presents many of the real life applications of mathematics. Thirty-three sections cover number systems to fuzzy logic and chaos. The book features diagrams and explanatory sidebars.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2001
An early recommendation simply stated of mathematician John Nash, “This man is a genius.” His early promise seemed lost when in 1959 at thirty he was diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic. Amazingly after thirty years he recovered. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in the theory on non-cooperative games. This book is a compilation of Nash’s influential papers and essays by himself, a colleague, and his biographer. A photo essay is included.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2004
The foundation of science and mathematics is logic. Mazur investigates three types of logic: the classic logic of the Ancient Greeks, the logic of infinity, and the everyday logic of plausible reasoning. He illustrates how we determine something is true with anecdotes from the history of science and math, his thirty years of observing students, and his own adventures in exotic lands.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2001
Take a short course in the five revolutions in geometry: Euclid, Descartes, Gauss, Einstein, and Witten. A former faculty member at the California Institute of Technology, Hollywood writer, educational software developer, and High Tech businessman, the author writes a lucid account of some very weird ideas.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2002
This book answers the perennial question: “When will I ever use this?” Written for math-phobic adults who are facing the necessity of brushing up their math skills, this book will provide plenty of examples of math in real world situations. The first section reviews math, the next three sections show math in action in money matters; in the kitchen and around the house; and shopping, weather, travel, and games.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2003
Wallace explores the nature of a big idea from a fiction writer's perspective. Although the beauty of math and the concept of infinity are made accessible to readers with an average math background, the book is structured to give satisfaction to readers with stronger math backgrounds. More difficult information is identified as IYI: If You're Interested. He discusses the contributions of Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Karl Weierstrass, Richard Dedekind, and Georg Cantor. A list of abbreviations is provided.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2000
If you want to understand why your dad and mom care if the Fed raises the prime interest rate, this book is for you. Separate chapters examine the history of money, coins and paper money in the U.S., banking, the Fed, the Euro, and investing. THe pages of this guide for readers 9-12 are filled fun facts, advice, activities and games.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2002
Professor of Theoretical Physics, Charap translates difficult mathematical ideas into terms understandable to a general readership. He reviews the 20th century’s transformation of physics, and then presents the latest findings in particle physics, astrophysics, chaos theory, and cosmology. He examines missing matter, the big bang, and superstring theory.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 1998
Kaczymarski's book is a manual for teachers interested in a creative, multidisciplinary approach to math instruction. The author uses familiar, popular children's books and stories as a springboard for math problems of all types.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2003
Kids count from one to ten as they explore a farm. Rhyme and bright watercolors add to the fun. A glossary of farm terns is included.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 1998
Just four years ago, Andrew Wiles of Princeton University solved a 350 year-old math problem: Fermat's last theorem. In a book that is part detective story, part testament to Wiles's determination, Simon Singh chronicles Wiles's dogged pursuit of the answer. Limericks and an appendix of math proofs are added pleasures to an already rich reading experience.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2003
When the author arrived at Caltech in the early 1980s on a post-doctoral fellowship, he was tormented by self-doubt. He took his worries to Nobel Prize-winner Richard Feynman. This brief memoir explores the friendship of two physicists, one up-and-coming, the other established and dying. Understand there is more of the mathematician and scientist is this book than math and science.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2006
Anthony Ant has embarked on a great explore. Young readers can follow Anthony through the maze of an ant hill. Part of the fun is finding Anthony. Visual clues are provided. Parental readers may need a magnifying glass. Each two page spread features a square of ants from1x1 to 10x10.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2002
Children become familiar with circles, triangles, squares, and rectangles and then search for them in every day contexts. The book includes tips for parents and a laminated poster.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2006
This illustrated version of a familiar children’s song has poignancy and humor as five ducklings wander off one by one from their bewildered mother. Children count back from five to zero, until mother duck is finally reunited with her ducklings. Bates has individualized each duckling. A touch young children will appreciate.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2000
Intended for advanced math students, high school or older, this book explores five mathematical theories and explains how knot theory contributes to the development of new drugs, how coding theory makes mapping human DNA possible, and how control theory has affected space travel. You'll also learn about the personalities behind the mathematics.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 1998
Glass engages young readers with one of the most famous math myths, centered around geometry great Rene Descartes.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2006
Count your way from morning to night and from city to country across two-page spreads filled with details: flowers, antennas, freckles, headlights, traffic cones, tree stumps, fallen apples, stars, and a lot more.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2002
Follow George, a quarter, from his stamping in the mint through his small adventures in finance. Each page provides opportunities to count and compute with money. Even the page numbers are stated in money. A final section gives more information about money and a glossary. The illustrations provide plenty of humor and interest.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2005
Colors, shapes, opposites, and the numbers 1-10 are visualized in 77 fruits, vegetables, and spices. This colorful picture book provides a fun introduction to some basic kid knowledge.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2003
It started in 1852 with a question from a former student. What is the least possible number of colors needed to fill in any map so that neighboring countries are always colored differently? For the next 150 years, thousands of problems solvers attempted to solve it. The author has written an entertaining account of the four color problem and its solution. He defines the problem, explains the main ideas of the proof, describes philosophical problems raised, and introduces related coloring problems, such as how many colors would you need if your map were printed on a doughnut? The book includes a timeline.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2001
Explore the region where mathematics and art meet. Filled with black and white and color illustrations, the book has chapters on subjects as diverse as plane folds in origami, grid fields and fractals, and crystals and tiling. You’ll meet artists who work with stone, computers and snow.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2006
Every number has a story. This updated 50th Anniversary edition of a math classic reveals the stories of natural numbers 0-9 and reports on advances in number theory. It includes the proof of Fermat’s Last theorem. This look at mathematical history and lore can be appreciated by a general audience. Solutions for problems are grouped at each chapter’s end.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2003
This collection of 370 cryptograms contains humorous quotes from celebrities like Johnny Carson, Stephen King, and Newt Gingrich. The introduction provides advice on how to approach cryptograms and two pages of hints. The answers conclude the book.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 1998
This is a most unusual alphabet book for readers of all ages. Where else would you find "R is for rhombicosidodecahedron" or "T is for tessellate"? Each entry comes with detailed information about the topic and entertaining illustrations.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2006
Diterlizzi has created a picture book combining the alphabet and numbers and a lot of eccentric fun with some of the weirdest creatures since Dr. Seuss. If you're not looking for logic, this is the perfect book for you. Kids will love its non-stop silliness.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 2007
Game theory, a branch of applied mathematics, is the study of games when they are played rationally. To reach a larger audience, this brief introduction explains game theory without mathematical equations. An expert in the field, the author examines game theory in the sciences, particularly evolutionary biology, psychology, ethics, politics, and economics. The book contains many illustrations.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2003
Geodesics are shell-like structures that employ interlocking triangles to hold themselves up without supporting columns. Kenner's classic manual for the construction of Buckminster Fuller's domes has been out of print since 1990. Divided into three sections, the book covers tensegrity and geodesics and provides data tables.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2001
This collection of 164 simple geometric patterns was created with triangles, squares, rectangles, diamonds, cubes, hexagons, octagons, and basket weave. Each page has an original design and three variations created by coloring in different areas of the original pattern. These copyright-free designs can be used as they are or as a start in creating something completely new.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2004
Here is a geometry primer the presents the basics in a clear manner for those frustrating moments when your textbook isn’t enough and it’s too late to call your teacher. Chapters cover triangles, circles, perimeter and area of two-dimensional polygons, volume and surface area of three-dimensional polygons, and conic sections. Each chapter opens with a pretest, and each chapter section ends with a self-test.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2000
In this counting book for children 4-8 based on the familiar nursery rhyme, Kellogg employs his trademark humor in providing a tangle of dogs, from pointers to spaniels, 250 in all. He even throws in velociraptors for good measure. The book includes a musical setting for the rhyme and a key to identify the dog breeds. Don't forget to count the bones.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2005
Hawking has selected 31 landmarks of mathematics from basic geometry to transfinite numbers, from Euclid to Turing. This massive book includes biographies of 17 mathematicians and full proofs and explanations of the significance of their work. One shortcoming is that the book has no index.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 1999
In January 1998 when astronomers found evidence that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, the most promising theory to explain it was one Albert Einstein proposed and quickly retracted, considering it his greatest blunder. This book for high school students and older explores the latest developments in cosmology and reveals a previously unknown Einstein.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2000
Godel's Incompleteness Theorem shattered hopes that logic would enable us to completely understand the universe. This biography for middle schoolers and older examines the life of a brilliant mathematician who was chosen by Time magazine as the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century and who was considered an intellectual peer by Einstein. His work revolutionized philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and cosmology.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2002
What do the arrangement of rose petals, a painting by Dali, and the spiral shells of mollusks have in common? This riddle is the starting point of a fascinating exploration of phi (1.6180339887499...), the Golden Mean. Roughly speaking, phi is a proportion. Not nearly as widely appreciated as pi, phi has entertained mathematicians such as Pythagoras, Fibonacci, Euclid, Kepler, and Roger Penrose, as well as biologists, artists, musicians, historians, architects, psychologists, and mystics. Much of nature, from the position of leaves on a stem to the structure of galaxies, can be explained by phi.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2006
The Golden Section is also known as the Golden Mean, Golden Ratio, and phi. It is defined as a line segment divided into two unequal parts, so that the ratio of the smaller to the larger is the same as the larger to the whole. This small, beautifully illustrated book reveals the Golden Section in nature, art, architecture, music, philosophy, science, and mathematics.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2001
This picture book for children 8-12 provides entertainment while teaching problem solving skills. Each of sixteen problems is presented pictorially and verbally and is accompanied by a hint for solution. An appendix supplies the answers and reveals how the hint provides a quicker solution. See if you can come up with your own strategies.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 1999
Eighty racers begin the Great Divide. Along the course, they encounter hazards, and the field of contestants is reduced by halves. Who will win? The outcome remains uncertain until the last moment. Readers 4-8 will become familiar with the concept of dividing in half and will love the verse and illustrations.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2006
Learn to estimate in groups of 10, then take on groups of hundreds and thousands. The author presents "clump counting" and "box and count," using full-color photos of plastic bugs, dog and cat stamps, penguins, rice grains, jellybeans, and other things. The book includes more hints for estimation.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2006
Mathematicians can be hotheads too as this book testifies. When Giralamo Cardano published The Rules of Algebra in 1545, he made mathematical history and an enemy of Tartaglia. Cardano had included a solution Tartaglia shared with him with the understanding he would not publish it until Tartaglia did. Cardano gave credit, but Tartaglia was not satisfied. The resulting feud ended with Cardano’s betrayal to the Spanish Inquisition 25 years later. In addition to ten feuds, the author examines a long standing question: Are mathematical advances inventions or discoveries?
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: 2005
Gridworks, a game in book form, exercises your deductive reasoning skills. Players place green, yellow and blue triangles, circles, and Xs on a nine cell square. Think tic-tac-toe. The 60 problems challenge beginners and experts. Two types of clues are given: positive and negative. The book format comes with a magnetic game grid and magnetic tokens.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 2001
Where do you keep your money? If you want your money to grow, to make more money, keeping it in your pocket is not the best strategy. This newly updated guide to investing examines savings banks, bonds, and stocks; helps you determine what kind of investor you are; and explains how to read the financial pages in the newspaper. An appendix provides forms for investment tracking.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2001
The hackers in this essay are the enthusiastic computer programmers who share their work with others, the original meaning of the word. This book for high school readers and older presents an ethic for the Information Age, one opposing the ethics that drove the Industrial Age. Sections discuss the Work Ethic, the Money Ethic, and the Nethic. An appendix provides a brief history of computer hackerism.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2000
Hannah likes to collect things: Popsicle sticks, buttons, stamps, seashells -- anything. When her teacher asks the students to bring in a collection, Hannah can't decide which one to take. Her solution is ingenious. Jocelyn's mixed-media collages are an adventure. Children and math teachers will find plenty to count and add.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2002
Hannah Bennett is thirteen and lives in rural Pennsylvania during the 1930s. She can’t read, but she can scan a page of words and tally letters in an instant. She teaches math to the younger students in her one room school. She keeps the books for the family farm. A visitor from Philadelphia is astonished by Hannah’s gift and offers her a chance to pursue her talent in the city. Hannah’s friends and family are reluctant to let her go. Only her grandfather sees math as her future and encourages her.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2005
Exercise your logic skills with 86 puzzles involving shapes, sequence, color, matching, distinguishing differences, spatial reasoning, simple arithmetic, and mazes. Each page features one brightly colored puzzle making it a perfect choice for a puzzle of the day in a math classroom. The answers are grouped in a separate section at the end.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2000
While Henry walks 30 miles to Fitchburg, his friend works in Concord to earn the 90 cents to take a train. The train is faster, he says. But on the way, Henry collects ferns and flowers, climbs a honey tree, and eats his way through a blackberry patch. From page to page, children 4-8 can calculate how far Henry has walked and the how much his friend still needs to earn. Everyone will enjoy the gentle humor of this picture book.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2007
Based on the familiar nursery rhyme, this picture book takes aspiring clock readers through twelve hours, from one oÂ’clock in the afternoon to midnight. Each hour is portrayed on an easy to read large-faced grandfather clock. An energetic mouse and his friends add some extra fun.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 2004
You don’t need to be a mathematician to enjoy this collection of 73 puzzles and mathematical recreations. Teachers and students will enjoy the mental wrestling required to solve Dudeney’s hinged square transformation and other geometric puzzles, mazes, and games.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 1999
Some humans learn to count by pointing at parts of their bodies, like their neck and ears, and the authors will explain how (plus much more) with exacting research and engaging color photographs.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2001
In 1900, David Hilbert gave a talk at the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris. He lectured on the importance of individual problems, listing those he thought would be most fruitful for mathematics in the twentieth century. Although he had time to talk about only ten, his published paper had twenty-three. This challenging book examines Hilbert’s problems and the mathematicians who solved them or have advanced their solution. In an introductory note, the author assures mathematical and nonmathematical readers that his book can be read and enjoyed for the math or the narrative.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2006
Solve a variety of multi-step math problems. Fisher has created fanciful scenes with mixed media and photography. The author provides four additional problems in an appendix for each of the fifteen scenes and challenges her readers to make up their own. Solutions are grouped at the end.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2004
It is nightfall and moms and dads ask their ducklings, kittens, and foals how many bedtime kisses they want. Readers count from one to ten and beyond in rhyming couplets. Bates’s illustrations are bright and cozy.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2007
Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles described the practice of mathematics as a room by room exploration of a dark mansion - first stumbling over furniture, learning each pieceÂ’s location, finding the light switch and turning it on to illuminate the room, and then moving on to the next room. Mathematicians do not think like Star Trek's Spock. Breakthroughs are often creative intuitive responses to ambiguity, contradiction, and paradox.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2007
The author traces the birth of mathematics in the pattern recognition and finger counting of hunter-gatherers at least 50,000 years ago. He continues his historical field trip by exploring pebble counting herder-farmers in the Middle East and the Americas, and then Ancient Egypt, Babylon, and Greece. The text features tables and illustrations. Sidebars offer recreational math.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2002
You won’t need a Delorean, but you’ll need more than what you can find at the local hardware store. After reading this small but dense book, you’ll understand the underlying theory of time travel and possess a plan for constructing a traversable wormhole and turning it into a time machine. A final section addresses questions raised, such as if time travel is possible, where are all the tourists from the future on their time travel getaways?
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2006
Anyone who spends time with kids knows that cake cutting requires precision. Stewart examines the finer points of cake cutting algorithms. By the way, it becomes increasingly complex with more eaters. He recommends further reading for cake cutting and looks at nineteen other conundrums and puzzles, such as shoe lacing techniques, packing problems, tangled phones cords, zero-one programming, predicting when Easter falls, and more. Stewart wanted to title his book Weapons of Math Distraction, which should give you an idea of its playful nature.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2007
This illustrated history of secret communication opens with a cipher primer. Chapters explore ancient codes and ciphers, military and national applications, and famous secrets revealed. Code fanatics are challenged to crack the kryptos code decorating a sculpture outside the CIA in Langley, Virginia.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2005
The Bobton-Trents are frightfully, frightfully rich, but their precocious son, H for short, discovers they soon will be frightfully, frightfully broke if they don’t earn some money. H and his equally wizard friend Stanton crunch numbers and devise a couple of schemes, but in the end, the Bobton-Trents require a radical change in lifestyle. The value of a balanced budget and friendship are explored in an entertaining manner.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2000
This picture book for children 4-8 contains nonsense verse for the numbers 1-10 fashioned from words rhyming with each number. Moreton's illustrations are as silly and appealing as the verse.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2004
This introduction to looking at art highlights the shapes artists use in creating paintings. American and European art from the 19th and 20th centuries, painting as different as the realism of Winslow Homer and the abstraction of Auguste Herbin contain eleven two dimensional shapes and three dimensional forms.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 2003
Count from one bug to ten and back to one. Count bugs that are alike. Count antennae and wings. Count legs and spots. Skip count even numbers and odd numbers. Pallotta packs a lot of counting in a small book, and the illustrators provide plenty of realistic icky bug details.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 1999
Schwartz and Warhola's science/math tale is a great way to introduce students to ratio and proportion. Learning that a frog can jump 20 times its length, or that an ant can lift an object 50 times its weight, students are able to explore what that might mean in human terms.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2007
Nahin relates for a general and mathematical audience the 2000 year history of the square root of minus one, also known as “i.” He combines mathematical and historical discussions and explains the application of complex numbers and functions to important problems. A series of appendices provide extended mathematical explanations.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2002
This book grew out of a mathematician’s attempt to recreate for non-mathematicians the act of mathematical imagining. In the process of exploring imaginary numbers, Mazur examines the role of imagination and imagery in poetry and mathematics, reviewing the work of Girolamo Cardano and Rafael Bombelli. Be of stout heart. No math beyond multiplication is required.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2001
In 1999, 16 year-old Sarah Flannery was declared Ireland's Young Scientist of the Year for a project called "Cryptography - a new Algorithm Versus the RSA." It dealt with the science of secrecy. In this autobiography, Sarah tells her own intellectual journey from solving problems on a blackboard in the kitchen to her own mathematical discoveries.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2000
An inchworm likes to measure vegetables in a garden but is dismayed when she finds her measurement is just a bit off. A half inchworm comes to her aid as do a third inchworm and quarter inchworm. This would make a good introduction to measurement and fractions for children 4-8.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2005
Kurt Godel was 23 when he presented his Incompleteness Proof. Goldstein looks at his mathematical theorem and its implications for mathematics as well as the places, people, and ideas that shaped his thinking.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2005
Berlinski’s brief history of mathematics devotes each of its ten chapters to a breakthrough in mathematics starting with Pythagoras and the right triangle and concluding with Benoit Mandelbrot and Mandelbrot sets.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2005
If the universe is infinite, then there are an infinite number of exact copies of you reading this sentence on identical planets. How about reading over your own shoulder? This book investigates the implications of infinity, an easy word to use but a slippery concept to understand. What is infinity? What are its logical consequences? Barrow writes for the general reader and looks at mathematics, physics, philosophy, and theology, fields that grapple with the concept.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2003
When told there were an infinite number of worlds, Alexander wept that he had not yet conquered one. This tour of the very, very big and the very, very small is aimed at the general reader who is curious about the notable thinkers, from Archimedes to Cantor and Robinson, as well as the mind-boggling concepts.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2001
Fractal Geometry is the geometry of the natural world, not the idealized forms of Euclidean Geometry. This comic-book-like primer presents challenging but fundamental concepts in small, understandable doses. Every page is illustrated, and activities help clarify concepts. In addition to the math, the book presents the people behind the ideas, some as familiar as Mandelbrot, some as obscure as Lewis. F. Richardson.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2001
If you think the Web is big, the Invisible Web is estimated to be 500 times bigger. This guide is a comprehensive effort to define and map the Invisible web. Chapters examine the visible and invisible webs, present case studies, and explore future technology. Half the book is devoted to resources arranged in subject areas. Each entry supplies a URL and a resource description. A copy of this book belongs in every library, school media center, and computer lab.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2003
Newton invented the calculus, the mathematics of change and flow. He is credited with discovering gravity and for splitting white light into its constituent colors. Yet he also studied Alchemy. Gleick furnishes a fascinating glimpse into the life of a secretive genius.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2003
Einstein said “The only physical theories that we are willing to accept are the beautiful ones.” The twelve essays in this collection examine Einstein’s notion of mathematical beauty and the importance of mathematics in the sciences during the twentieth century. There is a lot of physics but also biology, chemistry, information science, and the search for extraterrestrial life.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2001
This picture book for children 4-8 is a collection of activities in math, observation, puzzle solving, shape recognition, mazes, and estimation. Every activity is an arrangement of candy, mostly jelly beans but other familiar penny candy too. An appendix supplies the answers and additional jelly bean super-challenges. Don't try to use this book on an empty stomach.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: 2004
Pappas takes her readers out of the classroom to discover mathematics in the real world. Now in its 20th printing this collection, provides 147 puzzles, historical snapshots, anecdotes, observations, optical illusions, mazes, and more to entertain and instruct. Solutions are at the end of the book.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2005
Su Doku is a number puzzle in a grid. The hardest examples are on 9x9 grids. This collection is aimed at younger puzzlers and begins with 4x4 grids. For those of you who are not already familiar with this relatively new but immensely popular puzzle type, the object is to fill in the blanks without repeating a number in a row, column, or box. The book contains 122 puzzles from easy to more difficult. The answers are collected at the end.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 2003
Grandma Beetle is busy getting her house ready for her birthday party when Senor Calavera knocks on her door. Senor Calavera is a skeleton and has come to take her, but she has a trick or two or ten in this combination trickster tale and counting book. Kids count from one to ten in English and Spanish. Morales’s illustrations include many elements of Hispanic culture.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2003
Sir Walter Raleigh needed a way to know how many cannonballs were in a pile by knowing the shape of the pile. His assistant took this problem a step further and looked for a way to fill a ship’s hold with the maximum number of cannonballs. Johannes Kepler provided a quick answer: stack the cannonballs like oranges. This book examines the nearly four hundred year search for a mathematical proof of Kepler’s answer. The book includes fifteen mathematical appendices.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2004
What is you money personality? Are you a Major Spendthrift, Cool Operator, or a Scrooge? Complete the assessment and find out, then learn how to find the best deals when shopping, how to start your own business, how to make money, and how to become a millionaire? Billionaire? The section on budgeting is especially valuable.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2003
This guide starts with a history of money, and then examines how to make it, use it, grow it, and control it. An afterword examines the Euro and the twelve European nations that have adopted it.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2006
Classical geometry fell out of favor in the middle of the twentieth century when Nicholas Bourbaki, in reality a group of French mathematicians, argued that the future of geometry was in analytic geometry. Their motto was “Down with Euclid! Death to the triangles!" This view prevailed. Coxeter ignored the mainstream and became the greatest geometer of the twentieth century. Coxeter groups, numbers and diagrams have played a large role in the investigation of symmetry in math and science. Roberts presents the life and career of a mathematician who completed his last paper two days before he died at 96.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2002
Most of us struggle with knots from time to time. This brief introduction to knots, 127 pages, is written by an expert struggler. Sossinsky presents the basic ideas and explains the application of knot theory in meteorology, physics, and molecular biology. He outlines 150 years of knot theory, highlighting the work of Lord Kelvin, J. W. Alexander, Reidemeister, H. Schubert, Conway, Kauffman, and Vaisiliev. The book features many illustrations and a useful notes section.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2005
The author’s intent is to provoke curiosity and engage creative thinking in this collection of 93 problems dealing with area and combinatorial relationships. Full-page brightly colored puzzles use shape, knots, patterns, tessellations, and more to exercise the brain. This will make a good classroom resource.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2003
This is a practical text for the lab. It covers the basics about numbers and generic types of measurements, numbers used in chemistry, calibration and the use of lab equipment, methods and short cuts for making solutions, methods used in molecular biology, an introduction to statistics and reports and the communication of numerical data, and reference tables and equations. The book is spiral-bound.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2001
One summer afternoon in the late 1920s at a tea party in Cambridge, England, a lady declared that tea poured into milk tasted different from milk poured into tea. Among the scoffing tea drinkers was one, Ronald Aylmer Fisher, who set up an impromptu experiment to test her hypothesis. This book examines Fisher's contributions to the field of statistics and science as well as those of Karl Pearson, W. Edward Deming, and Stella Cunliffe. By the way, though Fisher never described the results of his tea party experiment, one eyewitness reported the lady correctly identified every cup she tasted.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 2004
This collection of 88 puzzles features Leonardo’s hidden message puzzles, Hamiltonian paths and circuits, and catenary or gravity curves formed when a chain is hung freely between two fixed points. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is an inverted catenary. There is a lot more too. The graphics are bright and engaging.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 1999
In this book for preschool and kindergarten children, Hoban combines simple graphics and photographs to introduce the concepts of number and counting.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2006
This book takes the form of letters from a mathematician to Meg, an aspiring math student. He introduces the basics and describes what mathematicians do at work and at play. He dispels the myth that a mathematical appreciation of nature is somehow less esthetic than an artistic one.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: July 2005
This concise book (111 pages) on functions supplies comprehensive information in single-variable functions, explains concepts of functions, and includes an appendix covering the basic details of polynomial, rational, exponential, logarithmic, and trigonometric functions. It has many illustrations.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: July 2002
Here comes the school bus, beep, beep, beep. Set in rhyming verse, this picture book follows a bus as it takes seven riders to school and returns them home. Readers can count the riders: a goat, pig, fox, chick bear, worm, and sheep in the bus windows.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2005
Want to make your money last longer? Spend less. Even “small” expenses add up. Two cans of soda a day from a vending machine can cost $40 a week. If you buy the same cans in a discount store, you can save up to 75%. The author looks at debt, expenses, insurance, education, cars, credit cards, and retirement and does the math to support his arguments. This would make a good source book for applied math.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2004
Any problem solving activity involves pattern seeking and conclusions arrived at through logic. We use logic all the time, yet the author argues we are not very logical. This brief and readable introduction to logic uses story, puzzle, illustration, and questions to guide the reader to a better understanding of a critical subject.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2001
Logic puzzle lovers will find 64 challenges in this collection. A puzzle skills chart at the end of the book lists the mathematical skills used in each, such as averaging, measurements, fractions, comparing data, graphs and charts, sorting, decimals, and more. Charts for solving the puzzles are provided, a real blessing for the inexperienced. Solutions are grouped at the end of the book.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2006
This revised edition has 49 logic puzzles. If you find yourself stumped, a special feature of this collection is a section suggesting problem solving strategies. All solutions are gathered at the end.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2000
When the lights go out during a storm, Grandmother tells a story about a mountain girl lost in a blizzard, illustrating her story with string figures. A lengthy appendix outlines the tradition of string figures and provides directions for making a loop and the figures in the story. Mordan's ink on clayboard illustrations resemble etchings in this story for 4-8 year olds.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2006
The object of these puzzles is to arrange 16 arrow tiles within a frame of 20 digits so that each digit has the corresponding number of arrows pointing to it. Sound easy? Dust off your logic and give all 42 noggin numbing numbers a go. The answers are grouped at the end of the spiral-bound book.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 1998
King and Kenyon incorporate everyday objects like beans, pizzas, and more in their explanation of the many ways fractions of a whole may be represented (decimals, fractions, percents, ratios). A school/library edition is available.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2007
The authors, both mathematicians, have combined mathematics papers and fiber arts projects illustrating the concepts. Each chapter addresses the underlying math and presents detailed instructions for a Mobius quilt, bi-directional hat, Sierpinski shawl, torus, symmetries sampler, algebraic socks, FortunatusÂ’s purse, pillow of braid equivalence, hyperbolic pants, and an embroidered Holbeinian graph. The book has many full-color photos.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2002
This military history reveals the contributions made by a forgotten commoner, a cryptographer on the Duke of Wellington's staff, to the ultimate defeat of Napoleon. A tale describing the early days of cryptography and one of Europe's greatest military campaigns, the Peninsular Wars (1807-1814), makes for exciting reading.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 1993
This book was first published in Brazil in 1949 by the mathematician Julio de Melo e Sousa. Tahan was an imaginary Arab author. On the road to Baghdad, Hanak Tade Maia meets Beremiz Samir, the man who counted. Hanak observes as Beremiz uses his mathematics to settle disputes, give advice, overcome enemies, right wrongs, and become rich. In 34 chapters, readers learn about mathematics, a science the Arabs developed and extended.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2003
This handbook is a guide for tackling word problems. It follows suggestions of the National Council of teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and uses problems like those found in the PSATs and SATs. Separate sections treat equation, percents, mixed, measurement, rate, statistics and probability, and geometry problems. An appendix review types of equations. Answers are given for practice questions.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2002
Trigonometry has applications in astronomy, engineering, physics, chemistry, geography, navigation, surveying, architecture and the studies of electricity, light, and sound. This reference for students, teachers, and parents provides an application-oriented approach to the subject and features real-world examples. The text reviews numbers, coordinate systems, and basic geometry before presenting a comprehensive explanation of the fundamentals of trigonometry.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2006
The author suggests toothpicks as a safer manipulative for this collection of puzzles. Determine the correct number of triangles, squares, rhomboids, hexagons, and other figures formed with sticks. Puzzles are rated easy, medium, and diificult, and the solutions are grouped at the end.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2004
Both artist and physicist, Atalay is perfectly suited to argue that while most artists intuitively use the scientific elements of perspective, proportion, shape, and symmetry in their work, Leonardo most likely did so consciously. This book attempts to synthesize art and science. After presenting the framework of science and math underlying art, Atalay examines Leonardo’s model.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2003
In this collection, every two-page spread presents a different rhyming riddle and illustration to solve. Use your creative problem solving skills to arrive at an answer. Tang includes a hint for a labor-saving approach in each case. Still stumped? The answers and efficient approaches are included in a closing section.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2003
The beauty of mathematics is often neglected in favor of its utility. This book highlights the beauty. Chapters cover beauty in numbers, arithmetic marvels, problems with surprising solutions, algebraic entertainments, geometric wonders, mathematical paradoxes, counting and probability, and a concluding miscellany. One activity, in a collection of more than one hundred, has students prove that the angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees by folding its vertices to its base.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October-95
A fantastic math adventure for readers age 9-12! Imagine the terror of the narrator when she wakes up one day to discover that everything in her life has turned into a math problem. She suspects that her teacher, Mrs. Fibonacci, has put a math curse on her, and in her quest to rid herself of this hex, she spirits readers into a lively and informative world of math know-how.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2006
Sometimes it’s the vocabulary of math that gets in the way of doing math. This dictionary provides clear, concise definitions of terms with many illustrations. Definitions are cross referenced to related terms. “Did You Know” factoids are sprinkled throughout the text.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2003
This introduction to mathematics is aimed at the general reader. It covers irrational numbers, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, differential and integral calculus, the concepts of zero and infinity, vectors, set theory, chance, and probability. It includes brief biographies of Copernicus, Descartes, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2004
Familiar fables are the framework for a counting book that explores all the possible combinations of numbers that make 1-10. A final section reviews combining numbers to make numbers and gives more practice.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2001
In Math Fair Blues, it’s time for Math Fair. Seth asks if his band can give a concert instead of doing a project. His teacher insists on a project. When they decorate their band t-shirts with circles, rectangles, triangles, and squares, they unknowingly complete a project. In Henry Keeps Score, Henry insists on getting as much as his sister, until he learns she has a cavity. Both early reader books include related information and math activities.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2002
Each two-page spread presents a counting problem in riddle form. Find the answers by simply counting or look for patterns and combine items. This brightly illustrated book encourages creative problem solving. Answers are provided at the end of the book.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2000
Are you frustrated in math class? This book for high schoolers and older, argues that the ability to think mathematicfally arises from the same symbol-manipulating capacity that underlies language. You're probably better in math than you think. You just don't recognize when you are using mathematical reasoning. The author suggests ways to improve mathematical skills.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2004
Most have experienced it, but how many of us have contemplated the math underlying our toast falling butter-side down? The author, who wrote the Mathematical Recreations column for Scientific American for eleven years, blames Euclid and the Greeks for making mathematics seem tedious and mechanical. He much prefers the playful spirit of the Babylonians and Egyptians. Stewart serves plenty of mathematical fun in twenty chapters.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2005
In 1992, a researcher announced that babies four months old could tell the difference between groups of one, two, and three objects and that they could recognize when objects were added or subtracted. Later experiments found that infants two days old could do the same math. So, if the ability to work with numbers is wired in, why do many of us have trouble in the classroom? Math as it is commonly taught is an abstract exercise. Devlin suggests that student success would increase if the math they did was given meaning.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: July 2005
Once again Tang and Briggs have produced a book to develop problem solving skills. The counting tasks in this collection at can be approached in different ways. Grouping provides an answer in a jiffy. The problems and approach hints are in verse. A final section reveals and explains the solutions.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2000
What can a substitute teacher do when her class breaks out in math rashes: plus and minus signs, digits zero to nine, multiplication and division signs, and entire math problems? Cure them by taking the class out for recess. Some very strange things happen in this collection of stories set in W.T. Melon Elementary School. This chapter book would make a good classroom read aloud book.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2002
This is not a book of numbers, formulas, or computations, writes the author in her introduction, but a book of ideas, mathematical ideas as diverse as cricket chirps and computer crashes. All the math in the 38 short chapters is discussed in general terms. Readers will find plenty of illustrations and suggestions for further reading.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2003
This history opens with a 60 page overview of mathematics. It traces the major developments, provides 25 essays on subjects like pi, non-Euclidean geometries, and logic. A final section points the curious to print and Internet resources. This expanded edition includes classroom resource material.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 1999
In the Math Zone, students take a trip through the Fractal Forest and ride a Möbius roller coaster. The book includes more than 40 fun activities and sidebars to help explain underlying math concepts.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: July 2004
This example filled tutorial in problem solving opens with a review of George Polya’s four step method. It provides plenty of practice, quizzes, and a final exam in the ten basic types of word problems found in math textbooks. Chapters highlight decimals, fractions, percents, and equations.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: July 2003
Tang's stated mission is to make math and problem solving a part of every child's life. His approach is always fun. In his latest book he uses elements from familiar paintings instead of numerals to teach addition and problem solving strategies. The book features the work of twelve artists from Degas to Warhol. Paprocki uses color and design to group objects from each painting like umbrellas, fish, or eyes. A solution section describes approaches to each set of problems. Art notes provide descriptions of the nine art movements represented.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2006
More mathematical theorems have been proved and results found in the last hundred years than in all of previous history. The author has selected 30 problems of pure and applied mathematics and describes their origins and their solutions. The final chapter presents some open problems like the perfect numbers problem and Complexity Theory’s P = NP problem.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 1999
Is mathematics discovered or created? Why is mathematics so useful in the natural sciences? A.K. Dewdney takes young adult readers on an fictional journey to Miletus, Aqaba, Venice, and Oxford to answer these and other related questions in an entertaining and clearly written book on the power of mathematics.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2003
This collection of 100 puzzles is organized by themes: insight, numbers, combinatorics, probability, geometry, geography, games, algorithms, handicaps, toughies, and unsolved. Solutions are found at the end of each section, except the unsolved section, of course.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2002
This cross-cultural mathematics examines divination, time measurement, cycles of time, models and maps, systems of relationships, and threshold figures in South America, Oceania, Africa, Europe, India, and Indonesia. Artifacts and methods are illustrated from traditional cultures like the Maya, Marshall Islanders, Tongans, Trobriand Islanders, Borano, Malagasy, Basque, Tamil, Balinese, and Kodi.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2006
Games can be divided into four classes: those of pure chance, mixed chance and skill, pure skill, and automatic. In short chapters, the author analyzes and illustrates the mathematics underlying games from golf to chess. If you like to win, this reprint of a 1989 title can provide some tips.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2002
This puzzle collection contains 108 brain busters rated from the merely difficult to the outrageously difficult, probably impossible for Dorothy and other Homo sapiens to solve. If that word "impossible" is a challenge you can't refuse, this collection will supply hours of fun and frustration. Puzzle types include geometry; mazelike problems; sequences, series, sets and arrangements; physical world; probability and misdirection; number theory and arithmetic.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2003
Mathematical models suggest that the brain can generate false memories by combining features of stored memories. The author, an Australian mathematician who studies neural networks, memory and learning, and adaptive systems, argues that such spurious memories are the basis for creativity and that they are required for learning. Dreaming helps to organize memory by processing the new and forgetting the unimportant. In a startling chapter, Christos proposes that infant dreaming may provide an explanation of SIDS.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2004
A compilation of three previously published puzzle collections, this book includes many time honored puzzles from what the authors believe was the golden age of puzzlers, the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. Eager puzzlers will find visual and mathematical challenges as well as others based in anagrams, numbers, magic squares, codes and ciphers, and logic. All the answers are in a separate concluding section.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2000
All the puzzles in this spiral-bound collection can be solved with a pencil, or ten, logical thinking, and a bit of arithmetic. It includes a variety of puzzle types, including battleship, dominoes, hex loops, lighthouse, minesweeper, snaky tiles, worms, and more. An appendix provides the answers. But don't cheat!
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 1999
This collection of mathematical recreations for children 9-12 contains projects, puzzles, and tricks. Chapters include activities with circles and flexagons, instant calculations and mind reading, illusions, precise measurement without instruments, math in every day life, and solitaire games. The perfect book for parties, long car trips, or any time kids want to challenge their brains.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2000
When the clock strikes midnight, Chester, Leon, and Maury are ready to play. Each page provides a different math-related game. Some games use counting or simple addition and subtraction. Others require playing cards, dice, buttons, or homemade calculators. There's even a hopscotch game. The last page provides answers for activities that require answers. This book is for children 4-8, and their big sisters and brothers.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2002
One million dollars in prize money awaits anyone who solves one of the mathematical problems identified by the Clay Foundation. This book provides a background for each problem and explains why they are so hard to understand. As the author says, most are impossible to describe accurately in lay terms. The problems are in topology, number theory, particle physics, cryptography, computing, and aircraft design.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2006
What would a million dots look like? Open this book. If you look at each dot for one second, it will take eleven and a half days to see them all. Along the way to a million, Clements and Reed feature other fascinating numbers: a mosquito’s wings beat 600 times a second. Light travels at 186,000 miles a second. In the last sixteen days, more than 500,000 cars have gone to junk yards.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2003
There are millions of things and many ways to measure. In this picture book, Marvelosissimo the Mathematical Magician takes the kids on an exploration of measurement: length, weight, and volume. After a discussion of standard measure, Schwartz and Kellogg present the metric system. The book concludes with an appendix on measuring and the metric system.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2003
Allen is convinced that you can enhance your mind power by working through the exercises in his book. He provides tasks in concentration, creativity, problem solving, and lateral thinking. An introductory questionnaire helps you to focus on specific color-coded areas: memory, problem solving, communication, creativity, and mind development. Each exercise is rated for difficulty and provides an estimate of time required.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2003
This collection of thirty-nine games and variations requires only the simplest equipment to stretch the brain. Games use words, pencil strokes, and numbers. A second section suggests strategies for eight of the games. A table rates the difficulty of each game from one to three stars, tells how many can play, and whether you need plain or graph paper.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 1998
Creative invention is afoot when Miss Bindergarten tells her students to bring "100 of some wonderful, one-hundred-full thing" to celebrate the first 100 days of kindergarten. Kids will love the crafts and contraptions inspired by this spirited teachers' instructions; educators will appreciate the authors' tribute to their real-life inspirations for the character of Miss Bindergarten, presented in an appendix.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2006
The author introduces August Mobius and then describes applications of his Mobius strip in mathematics, magic, science, art, engineering, literature, and music. As always, Pickover writes about mind-stretching ideas in an accessible manner. The book contains many illustrations.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 1999
When Archimedes suddenly hit upon the principle of buoyancy, he jumped from his bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse, crying "eureka!" Encounter the Monty Hall Problem, learn Russian peasant multiplication, calculate the number of ways a chef can combine ten or fewer spices. Benson has written an introduction to the joy of mathematical discovery in which the general reader, high school or older, arrives at solutions as a scientist would, and with the same feeling of surprise.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2004
The Lydians minted the first coins more than two thousand years ago in the region that is now called Turkey. The coins were a mix of gold and silver called electrum. Explore the world of money. Drobot covers the history, terminology, minting and printing, and saving and spending of money. She includes a chapter on cops and robbers and buried treasure.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 1999
Readers age 4-8 will enjoy the highly creative, whimsical illustrations of monsters attending a birthday party in this rhyming, counting book.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 1999
Try out some of these Chinese "brain games" designed to develop logic, verbal reasoning, and spatial sense. Baifang offers 57 stick-puzzle games and verbal problems in this challenging puzzler.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: July 1999
Young readers will enjoy investigating how familiar nursery rhymes teach basic, important math concepts.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2001
Mrs. McTats buys a fish to share with Abner, her cat, but scratching at her door announces the arrival of two more cats. She invites them in and calls them Basil and Curly. The next day three new cats appear. This amusing tale is told in verse. Children can count, add, and anticipate the names of the new cats as Mrs. McTats progresses through the alphabet. The last arrival is a surprise. Rankin's cats are endearing and sport oddly human noses.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2005
When Matt and Bibi Zills are trapped inside an Egyptian pyramid, they follow geometric clues to escape. This geometric adventure introduces eight common geometric solids: cone, cylinder, cube, sphere, pyramid, tetrahedron, rectangular prism, and triangular prism. Search the illustrations for addition examples of the solids.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2005
Search for ten shapes in this collection of art from around the world and spanning thousand s of years. An appendix identifies the art.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2003
Is there a pattern to prime numbers? Mathematicians since the Ancient Greeks have tried to answer this question. Bernard Riemann presented a paper in 1859 on primes that suggested an answer, but when Riemann died his housekeeper burned all his personal papers. No one knows if he found the proof. This account of the search for a proof to Riemann's Hypothesis is filled with the brilliant, the eccentric, a million dollar prize, and implications for banking, e-commerce, quantum physics, chaos theory, and computing.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: July 2006
This collection contains personal essays written by John Archibald Wheeler, Leonard Susskind, Lee Smolin, Jana Levin, Paul C. W. Davies, George Smoot, Maria Spiropulu, George Dyson, and more big names in big ideas. Smoot writes about aesthetics and observation in Einstein's theories. Wheeler writes about Einstein as a mentor. Rocky Kolb writes about the discovery Einstein didn't make.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2002
Frog reads by the light of the moon until clouds cover it. Helpful fireflies square off to help, though careful to stay out of range of his tongue. The smallest square, 2 by 2 is not bright enough. Neither is 3 by 3 and 4 by 4. And 10 by 10 proves blinding. The resourceful fireflies have a solution. This makes a fun introduction to the concept of squares.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2004
What is the difference between as number and a numeral? Numbers exist independently. Numerals are bound to language and writing. This multicultural exploration of numbers and numerals covers 1000 years and looks at history, symbolism, and philosophy. The book features scores of photos, illustrations, charts, art, and artifacts.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2000
The Aleph is the sum of positive integers. It is not the last positive number because there is no last number. It can only be approached. Is that clear? This book for the mathematically inclined middle school student or older tells the story of Georg Cantor, a 19th century mathematician who pioneered the study of infinity. One last point to ponder: There are as many points on a line one inch long as on a line one mile long.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2004
The author believes everyone can become proficient in mathematics. His program JUMP (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies) is based on that belief and it works. It has been implemented in hundreds of Canadian schools and is being tested in the U.S. Mighton describes the conception of JUMP and presents his method for fractions, multiplication and division, coordinate systems, ratios and percents, logic and systematic search, and finite state automata. He includes practice exercises.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 2005
Mathematicians can devise unusual rules of signs to explore their consequences. For example: a system in which -4 x -4 = -16. Such “fooling around” isn’t talked about in schools, but one aim of this book is too show how new maths can describe aspects of the physical world. The author uses history, puzzles, and high school algebra to entertain a general and professional audience.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2007
The author has collected paradoxes, mathematical conclusions that seem unreasonable or impossible. He examines problems in probability and statistics, tennis scoring, needle tossing, TorricelliÂ’s Trumpet, hyperdimensions, Friday the 13th and more.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2000 (Reprint edition)
Originally published in the U.S. in 1998, this book for readers 10 and up is finally available in paperback. Robert, a 12 year old who hates math, has a series of dreams in which a number devil manages to make difficult mathematical principles understandable. Humor and full color illustrations make this book fun as well as instructive.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 1998
Alexander invites children in grades K-8 to have lots of fun as they work through twenty open ended, problem solving games designed to strengthen skills in computation and solving equations. The book comes with a set of 86 number practice cards and Alexander provides a preface for parents and teachers.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2005
In this new edition of his classic, Dantzig describes the development of mathematics from our innate number sense to the leading edge of modern math. This updated version includes a new notes section and bibliography written by math professor Joseph Mazur. For the mathematically curious, there is an extensive further reading section.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2001
This book is an explanation of mathematical proofs. It presents the rules of logic and technique to construct proofs. The second edition provides more examples, exercises, and a complete treatment of mathematical induction and set theory. This accessible book can be used in the classroom or for self-study.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2006
Hypatia was born in Alexandria 1600 years ago, and because her father was a professor, she was educated in a manner not common for girls. In time, she became a widely respected teacher of math, science, and philosophy. This biography includes notes and recommended reading.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2002
Count from one to ten with Olivia, a most charming piglet with her own sense of style. Can you guess where she ties her two hair bows? This heavy board book will take a lot of punishment.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2006
This is not a biography of a man but of his mind at work. Get inside Einstein’s head and share the excitement as he understands a part of the universe’s hidden order.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 1999
When Professor X's popcorn machine won't stop spewing popcorn, Numero tries to count the kernels, but as quick as he is, he can't count fast enough. Professor X and his dog Y suggest Power Counting or counting by powers of ten. This picture book for 9-12 years olds presents real-life examples of really big numbers, such as how many trees we could save if everyone in the U.S. recycled newspaper and how many atoms are in every breath we take.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2004
Young counters count from one to ten dragon boats, seasons, candles, bamboo shoots, and more and learn about aspects of Chinese culture as well. Rhyming verse identifies some of the details to be counted, but close observation of each two-page spread will reveal even more, and a few surprises too. A glossary explains references to Chinese culture.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2002
Count from one to ten, read eleven Haiku, and discover aspects of Japanese culture all in one beautifully picture book. An end note describes Japanese gardens and the Haiku poetic form.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2000
This picture book for children 4-8 has three chapters each with a different subject: days of the week, months and seasons, and counting one to ten. The counting chapter has full-page illustrations of the sea. Lobel's paintings are vibrant and energetic. Her bold brush strokes recall Van Gogh.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2000
Children 4-8 can count to ten in this ingeniously illustrated story about a lonely sea horse. All the creatures and the reef are made of fruits and vegetables. At the end of the story, a key is provided for readers unfamiliar with some of the more exotic foods. Set in rhyming couplets, this book will continue to please after many readings.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2005
In this intricate pop-up book, Carter has fashioned ten fantastic paper sculptures. One puzzle box to ten curlicues hide one red dot for young children to discover. The book is fragile and is best viewed with an adult.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2003
A witch needs ingredients for a special brew. Two cats provide a fish. Four goblins throw in some slugs. Nine skeletons give a finger bone. The witch then invites all the contributors to a party. Told in rhyming verse and with suitably gruesome illustrations, you can count on this book to keep everyone happy.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2000
Readers 9-12 will find this collection of familiar and unusual illusions a great way to spend an afternoon. Each section features an illusion, some variations, and an explanation of what is going on. It provides instructions for making a pair of 3D glasses to view stereo images of Mars too.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2007
The authors are the founders of The Math Circle, a learning program at Harvard. They describe math education today as the mastery of skills and facts. Rather, they argue, math should be taught as the highest form of intellectual play. Chapters examine barriers to math appreciation, how mathematicians really work, and the Math Circle Program.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2002
This latest version of a well-known 19th-century counting rhyme features large format illustrations. Each spread from one baby to ten beavers contains corresponding background details to search for and to count.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: July 2005
Take a tour through the world of mathematics. Pickover supplies history, biography, philosophy, number theory, geometry, probability, huge numbers and scores of problems for math novices and masters. The book features illustrations, factoids, anecdotes, definitions, and quotations. Answers are grouped in a final section. This will make a good class resource.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2001
When you hear the term, "peer-to-peer file sharing," you probably think of Napster and others like Gnutella and Freenet have provoked much legal debate, but what's behind the technology? In this collection of essays, peer-to-peer pioneers explain how technology is changing the way we communicate and exchange information and explore where it is and where it may be going.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2005
This book offers 92 recreational math problems. The puzzles deal with the four color problem, balance, Mobius strip, knots, the movement and position of chess pieces, and a variety of others. This will make a good classroom resource.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2004
The concept of pi is about 4,000 years old. To put that fact into perspective, our place value decimal system has been used in the West for about 800 years. The authors explain what pi is and how its value is calculated, discuss pi enthusiasts and curiosities, and show its applications and paradoxes. The Epilogue, pi to 100,000 decimal places, fills 27 pages.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2003
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, or at least half that. Photos illustrate fractions of sandwiches, teams, traffic lights in each two-page spread. Fractions are also stated as decimals and percents. An introduction shows how fractions are converted to decimals and percents.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 1999
When Mrs. Pig falls ill, it's up to the rest of the Pig family to fend for themselves at mealtime. Follow their funny adventures as they use math skills to work with a recipe.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 1998
When the pig family takes a trip to the golf course, their game becomes a learning experience for readers grades 2-6. Kids learn about geometry as the story unfolds and are invited to participate in the pigs' golf game with a game board and geometric game pieces that are provided with the book.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 1999
The Pigs miss their flight to Bean Town and wonder if they will have Christmas with the cousins. Arranging another flight, Mr. Pig saves the day. Or does he? The pilot and crew look a lot like Santa and the reindeer, and the flight has a few unexpected stops. Children 4-8 will learn about time zones, distance and speed.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2007
How many ways can you cut a pan pizza into equal pieces? This appetizing look at the parts of a whole illustrates proper and improper fractions all related to pizza and its ingredients.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2000
This is a republication of a novel that first appeared in 1984 and that has generated a cult following. First contact with the two-dimensional inhabitants of the planiverse was made when the author and his students were running a program called 2DWORLD. So opens a book that challenges readers to imagine how a two-dimensional world might work. This book combines fantasy, puzzle, and a cautionary tale about the difficulty of communicating with alien worlds.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2002
Impress the coach by telling him a soccer ball resembles a truncated icosahedron. Well, maybe it will impress your date. The sphere is the foundation of the five Platonic and thirteen Archimedean solids. These eighteen creations are the building blocks of three dimensional space and central to architecture, chemistry, and atomic physics. This small book features elegant line drawings by the author and enough information to satisfy serious students of science, design, and mathematics.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2007
In 1904 Poincare published a paper dealing with the potential shape of the universe. Proving or disproving his conjecture has occupied mathematicians for 100 years making it the most famous problem in geometry and topology. In 2000 the Clay mathematics Institute named it one of the seven essential unsolved problems of the new millennium and put up a one million dollar prize. In 2002, Grigory Perelman posted his solution on the Internet. This is a dense but exciting narrative covering the personalities, institutions, and research behind the mathematics.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2005
This history of mathematics presents an overview of two fields essential to the sciences. He introduces the mathematicians, describes the development of probability and statistics and explains their present day applications. The book includes a chronology, glossary, and list of Internet resources.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2006
It was to be a place to foster genius through research. The Institute for Advanced Studies was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner and funded by Louis Bamberger and his sister, Carrie Fuld. Flexner’s first hires included Oswald Veblen, Albert Einstein, and John von Neumann. Batterson examines the personalities behind one of the most famous centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry in the world.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2002
Puzzles have been around since 1650 B.C. Why? Puzzles appeared about the same time as myth, magic, and the occult arts. The author suggests that puzzles provide small-scale experiences of the large-scale questions life poses. Though mainly a philosophical investigation into the puzzle instinct, this book also furnishes an introduction to puzzle genres. Puzzles introduced in the book have solutions at the end.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 1999
This four-volume set of tantalizing brain teasers will test the logic of children age 10 and up. The "Brain-O-Meter" icon provides an easy way to assess each puzzle's level of difficulty; the puzzles are adapted from the popular Highlights for Children Puzzlemania series.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2003
This collection of mathematical puzzles should furnish an athletic workout for sluggish brains. You’ll find challenges in measurement, shape, area, logic, computation, and more. The answers are grouped in a concluding section.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2005
The 36 puzzles in this collection had their beginnings in Scientific American. They have been expanded for this book. Chapters contain problems in logic, graphs and circuits, strategy and games, science and form, and combinatorics. Understanding the puzzles seldom requires more than junior high math skills. All the solutions are grouped in a concluding section.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2007
There are more than 400 proofs of the theorem attributed to Pythagoras, including one by a 12 year old Albert Einstein and another by Grover Cleveland. The author examines the theorem from 1800 BCE in Mesopotamia to the present. He describes the personalities involved in its development. Sidebars provide tangential entertainment. Eight appendices offer more mathematical proofs and solutions to brain teasers posed in the text.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2004
Pythagoras’s theorem may be familiar, but this book makes the proof visually understandable. This brief book elucidates twenty mathematical proofs from Cavalieri’s Principle to Euler’s Formula. It opens with a discussion of what proofs are and ends with five appendices of additional material.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 1999
There is more than one way to count to seven, as Keith Baker's picture book for children 4-8 illustrates. Follow seven ducklings as they slide, play peekaboo, chase bumble bees, quack, dive, swim, and fly across the pages.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2001
For high schoolers and older, this book examines Linux and its chief architect Linus Torvolds, thousands of programmers who helped develop it, and other brilliant and sometimes bizarre characters like Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman. It tells the story of "free" software as an alternative to all proprietary software.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2000
While the older lions nap, a cub wanders off looking for a friend to play with but frightens everyone, from one red monkey to eight brown gazelles, with his over-sized roar until he finally meets nine other cubs. What a racket they make! Preschoolers and beginning readers will enjoy the rhyming couplets and Cole's bug-eyed critters.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 2006
In this generously illustrated celebration of geometry, the author first looks at the work of Pythagoras and Euclid, and then he reveals the geometry in the natural and in the man-made world. Plenty of photos, drawings, charts, and sidebars explain the underlying math.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2005
This small, beautifully illustrated book looks at counting systems, numbers considered significant in religions, and numbers in architecture. It examines number quality in astronomy, geometry, and music. It includes appendices with additional information and a glossary of number.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2004
The author, who trained as a mathematical physicist and who has written other popular books explaining physics and mathematics, takes on the quantum world. Is quantum mechanics as weird as it has been presented? Is it necessary to believe in randomness, long-range spooky forces, or life and death determined by observation? The author believes not. He critiques some of the current explanations then espouses a more elegant answer, that we live in a multiverse and that countless versions of reality exist side-by-side.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2001
A six-page inventory of illusions, some as familiar as hearing the ocean in a seashell, others as strange as an arctic explorer mistaking a walrus for a mountain, opens this exploration of illusions. Ninio is an international authority on visual perception. He demonstrates that illusions reveal the methods used by the brain to interpret sensory information. He gives examples of different types of illusions, including segregations, fusions, completions, creations, adaptations, constancies, reference points, and arbitrations.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2007
How long is a second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year? Adults consult their watches, clocks, and calendars, but what about kids? This book translates standard units of time into familiar units — the time required to complete common activities such as jumping rope, healing abrasions, learning to walk. Have your students suggest their own.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2006
Mathematics doesn’t just appear in textbooks, it is done by people. Many of the pieces in this collection put the faces on the math. Fifty brief chapters introduce Bernoulli, Hilbert Poincare, Fermat, and others and cover subjects from the extra .242199 of a day we accumulate each year to Bible codes. The last section shows math in action in the sciences and everyday life.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2005
This collection of 82 mathematical puzzles features geometry in two and three dimensions. Many problems involve tangrams, transformations, dissections, perfect squares, and packing. You’ll find logic puzzles too. All puzzles are full-page and in bright colors. The answers are at the end of the book.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 2004
The 89 puzzles in this collection encourage creative thinking and build problem solving skills. Test your spatial and logical reasoning, ability to sequence, shape recognition, estimation, and more. Puzzles are full page and often in color. The answers are grouped in a final section.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 1999
Readers age 4-8 are transported into an Arthurian math adventure when they have to help Sir Cumference and his knights find a meeting table. The rectangular table they'd used was too long and the knights had to shout to be heard; a geometric odyssey ensues when Sir Cumference, his wife Lady Di of Ameter, and their son Radius search for the perfect solution.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2002
This historical investigation recounts the events of October 24-30, 1929. Sidebars explain what stocks are, what the New York Stock Exchange is, what bulls and Bears are, and other stock market terminology. The book is liberally illustrated with archival photos; contemporary cartoons, poems, and songs; and other artifacts. It includes a section on sources.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2000
When Jules, Jacques, Jean, Ti-Paul, Philippe, and Pierre set out for a day of fishing in Louisiana bayou country, they discover they have only three poles and three cans of bait. Since no one has both pole and bait, they decide no one can fish. Grandmaman suggests a solution, but these silly friends manage to misunderstand, over and over again. Children 4-8 will enjoy discovering the errors of counting and logic in this Cajun "noodle" tale.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 1999
How can you slice a pizza to get the most slices with the fewest cuts? If you want to keep your head dry, should you walk or run in the rain? What is the length of the seam on a baseball? This challenging book for high school students and older presents the mathematics behind everyday phenomena.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2002
Smokejumpers are men and women who parachute into remote areas to fight fires. This counting book counts from one to ten and back to zero featuring dynamic scenes from the lives of smokejumpers, from a fire’s beginnings in one lightening strike to zero fires spotted and the smokejumpers’ return to base. Demarest’s experience as a volunteer fireman contributes authenticity to his illustrations. The book ends with pages of additional information and a bibliography.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 2003
Cutting snowflakes from paper is a yearly activity in art and math classes to illustrate the concept of symmetry. This beautifully photographed homage to the flake provides scores of images, a chapter on symmetry, and a field guide to falling snow to help you distinguish between stellar dendrites and sectored plates.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2003
Handley once taught a young boy some of the mathematical strategies in this book before he entered first grade, and the boy was treated like a prodigy all the way through school. Is the ability to do math quickly important? The author believes so and lists seven reasons, the most important being that we use math every day. Speed math is a non-technical book that anyone can use. Each chapter contains examples. Practice and you will beat a calculator too.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 1999
A colorful parade of cycling, cartwheeling, and marching monkeys helps teach children 4-8 how to count by twos, threes, and fours. The picture book also suggests additional learning activities, concept extensions, and other books that present similar concepts.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2006
The word “hack” in the title refers to a clever way to get something done. Chance is a part of life. Understanding of statistics can help you solve problems that arise because of chance. The first chapters provide the basics. The hacks follow for discovering relationships, measuring the world, beating the odds, playing games, and thinking smart. Seventy-five hacks are clearly presented with tips and examples, illustrations, and recommendations for further reading.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2003
If math isn’t your forte but you still need to understand statistics, then Rowntree’s introduction is a good start. He promises that his book will explain with words and diagrams so that students from other subject areas can see the statistical forest and not the computational trees. And he delivers.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2006
It may be true that you can’t win a lottery unless you play, but you’re still more likely to die in a car crash on your way to buy a ticket. If you’re curious about the likely and the unlikely in life, Rosenthal has written an entertaining explanation of probability for a general audience. What are your chances of winning at roulette or poker? How can you use statistics and poll results to make better decisions? How does randomness affect biology? The last chapter is a final exam.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 1999
The same author who helped students in K-3 learn about counting, addition, and other basic math skills helps them learn subtraction.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2006
The Monster of Symmetry is one of the four big challenges in mathematics. The Monster is a giant snowflake in 196,883 dimensions. The search for the Monster began with Evariste Galois in France in the 1830s. The author, who knows all the modern searchers, tells a fascinating story about an esoteric mathematics that could shed light on the deep physical form of the universe.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2006
This small, well-illustrated book looks at symmetry in nature and art architecture, science, mathematics, and our ideas of morality and justice. The book opens with a discussion of congruence, periodicity, rotation, and reflection.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2003
In 1665, Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens noticed that pendulums in two clocks close to each other would oscillate in unison. If he mixed up the swings, they would return to consonance with a half hour. In Malaysia, thousands of fireflies have been observed flashing in unison. Sync explains the tendency for the organic and inorganic to synchronize, from schooling fish to traffic jams. The author, a professor of applied mathematics at Cornell University, is a pioneer in the new science of synchrony.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2004
Count from one to twenty horns, humps, legs, spots, and more in the animal kingdom. Wormell’s bold and colorful linoleum-block prints are followed by a section giving more information about each featured creature.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2000
Based on a traditional children's rhyme, this picture book for Preschool-K opens with ten sleeping babies in colorful costumes. In turn, each baby moves to the bottom of the bed. At the conclusion, all the babies are reunited. Turn the book over and read it again. Read one way, and the last lonely baby is a girl. Read the other way, and the last is a boy. The book's ingenious design and Geddes's familiar way with infants will make this book a winner with young children.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2003
Ten Egyptian mummies are bored stiff so they decide to leave their tomb and have some fun. Kids can count down from ten to one with this rhyming picture book. Interesting pyramid facts are included inside the covers.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 2003
Tet is the Vietnamese New Year. Count from one to ten and learn about Vietnamese new year customs. A concluding section provides more information about Tet. The illustrations are unusual in that they were first drawn and then embroidered. Chuc Mung Nam Moi! Happy New Year!
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2003
The author presents ten crucial ideas fundamental to clear thinking. They are stated simply in an introduction and then separately treated in ten chapters. Each chapter examines instances culled from recent headlines when the rule was not applied. For example, Chapter 3 on Occam’s Razor looks at Clever Hans, Cold Fusion, Big Foot, and Crop Circles. Chapters include discussion questions and problems to solve. Answers are provided. This book belongs in every math and science classroom.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2000
This counting book in verse for children 4-8 furnishes information about common and uncommon animals as it illustrates the concept of multiplying by ten. A three-toed sloth brags about his toes until a centipede points out his thirty feet are ten times better. Baskin provides humorous pictures to accompany Michelson's witty verse. The book includes additional facts, questions and answers about each animal, and an index.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: July 2006
Explore time and the math used to measure it. This book looks at clocks, time zones, units of time, and calendars. It includes a glossary and recommends books and websites for the curious.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2004
This introduction to secret communication techniques begins with a discussion of the non-secret codes we encounter everyday: barcodes, zip codes, ISBNs, pictographs, and others. Sections treat codemaking, ciphers, codebreaking, concealment, and a Hall of Fame of super code makers and breakers. The enthusiastic will find a list for further reading.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2005
In this history of statistics, Cohen looks at how numbers have taken a leading role in science, government, marketing, sports, and many other aspects of modern life. He examines the Age of Reason and the birth of science, numerology and mystic philosophy, statistics, and critics of statistics. The book is written for a general audience.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2001
Told in verse, this picture book opens with ten timid turtles lounging in a line. One by one, the turtles are startled by other pond inhabitants and splash into the water. Children count backward from 10 to one. A final section called "Life at the Pond" introduces the ten creature actors in the story.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2002
Alfred Loomis was a successful businessman who knew how to make money and how to protect it. He anticipated the stock market crash of 1929 and made a fortune while most lost theirs. He also had an interest in science. During World War II, Loomis used his influence and urged FDR to spend millions in developing radar. This account focuses on his secret life promoting science in his private lab at Tuxedo Park where figures like Einstein, Heisenberg, Franck, Bohr, and Fermi met. He also set up a lab at MIT recruiting the great names in physics.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2003
Follow eight kindergarteners through their first twelve days of school. Count from one to twelve. Count the familiar classroom objects. Armstrong-Ellis’s illustrations are humorous, develop multiple storylines, and create recognizable student types, from the boy whose finger is always up his nose (or the class frog’s) to the girl who is constantly drawing horses.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2004
This desktop encyclopedia has more than 1800 entries covering everyday and esoteric mathematics, theorems, biographies, puzzles, games, and humor. All puzzles posed have solutions. Serious students will find a large reference section for further reading. Teachers will find a category index to select entries for classroom study.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 1999
The author, a former math teacher, quit his teaching post and devoted the next ten years of his life to travel and research to answer the fundamental and disconcerting questions of mathematics innocently posed one morning by his students. The result of his labors is this monumental history, 663 two-column pages packed with illustrations, of counting and calculating. Clearly written and translated from the French, this book will make an excellent reference for middle school students and older and belongs in every school library.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: May 2006
This is a comprehensive history of algebra for the general reader comfortable with mathematics. The story begins four thousand years ago in Mesopotamia with problems incised on cuneiform tablets and concludes with Alexander Grothendieck and algebraic geometry. The author provides periodic math primers to aid the reader in understanding concepts.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2006
This is a counting book with an ecological theme. When Uno arrives in the forest, animals and plants thrive. His decision to live there leads to an influx of settlers and the degradation of the environment. Each page records the decline of plants and animals. Kids can tally the losses in Base's incredibly detailed illustrations. Have no fear, change for the better comes. Base is an optimist.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2001
This look at statistical graphics surveys two centuries of graphical practice, both the good and the bad and then sets out a practical theory of data graphics--how to best communicate information through words, numbers, and pictures. This is a fascinating and beautifully produced book.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2005
Randall is the first tenured woman theoretical physicist at MIT and Harvard University. She is an expert in particle physics, string theory, and cosmology. She is coauthor of the two most important scientific papers on string and supersymmetry theory. In this book directed to a general audience, she presents an overview of physics through the 20th century to the present. She has a knack for using analogies to make complex mathematical concepts, including additional spatial dimensions, understandable.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: September 2001
Take a round the world safari and count to ten, then carefully search the pages for hidden animals. Base has hidden details everywhere: in the parched Australian outback, in the Indian jungle, in a drop of water. Follow the waterhole as it dries up and is finally replenished when rain returns. The book features a cutout waterhole that gets smaller with every two-page spread.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2001
If you’re into Web design at school or at home, this book will help develop your skills in one important area. Well-designed menus are the key to successful sites. If you doubt this statement, wait until you encounter a poorly designed menu. This guide provides creative advice, checklists, and hands-on examples. The book includes a CD-ROM with templates, examples, and Web-design software.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2003
Learning how to interpret all the quantitative information we encounter each day can make the difference between making a wise or foolish decision. From cereal boxes to Olympic judging, numbers say it all. Or do they? Any doubts about the usefulness of the book should be dispelled by the second chapter: “The Ten Habits of Highly Effective Quantitative Thinkers.”
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2004
Mr. Crocodile plans his day from wakeup to bedtime. The book opens with his schedule, which lists hourly activities from 9 AM to 8 PM, including the catching, cooking, and eating of five pesky monkeys. Each two-page spread features a prominent analog clock showing the hour so young clock readers can follow the day’s progress. Though Mr. Crocodile plans to eat the monkeys who torment him, he decides in the end they make better friends.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: February 2000
This picture book for children 4-8 introduces number concepts and some associated vocabulary. For example, two, pair, couple, and the prefix bi- are illustrated with photographs of two objects, either children or things that will interest children. The last third of the book tests for understanding.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: March 2003
One at a time, ten cooks enter a kitchen to contribute their skills to a tremendous birthday cake, and as the cake bakes, they all pitch in to clean up. The author has provided three concluding sections on cooking with children, math in the kitchen, and recipes for a cake and two different frostings.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: April 2004
Young Pythagoras overhears two workmen complaining their ladder is too short to reach the roof of the temple that they are working on. This conversation starts Pythagoras on a series of investigations of tilting temple columns, direct sailing routes, stonecutting, and square tiles which culminates in his understanding of the properties of the right triangle. This is an entertaining and effective presentation of the Pythagorean theorem.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: November 2003
This book describes two millennia of mathematics in extrema. It is a technical book. The author expects readers to have some background in physics and calculus and to read with pencil and paper in hand. That said, he engages readers in a fascinating examination of how life works at the extremes of the very small and the very large. He includes many examples and problems.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: October 2000
This book for serious math students in high school or beyond argues that most ideas are unconscious, that abstract ideas arise through conceptual metaphors-mechanisms for projecting concrete reasoning into abstract reasoning. It even tries to answer the age-old question: how can a being with a finite brain comprehend infinity. Sections cover basic arithmetic; algebra, logic, and sets; infinity; space and motion; and the philosophy of mathematics. The final section contains four case studies. The book includes extensive references.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: August 2005
In the Fibonacci sequence, each term is the sum of the two previous terms, as in: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,…. The sequence traces a curve found in nature in plants and animals. In this book, it is the tiger’s claw, ram’s horn, and sea shells. The book follows the generation of the sequence up to 89 and illustrates its occurrence in animals.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: December 2000
Math fans, middle school and up, can join Dr. Googol and explore the world of numbers. This book contains 125 chapters covering topics as varied as fractals, the five strangest mathematicians, saippuakauppias (a Finnish word meaning seller of soap and the world's longest palindrome), and Zen archery.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: June 2006
Some rise to the challenge of attempting the impossible. The author examines the history of mathematics focusing on the quest for doing the impossible. Chapters address the irrational, imaginary, horizon, infinitesimal, curved space, fourth dimension, ideal, periodic space, and the infinite.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math
Published: January 2002
The ancient Chinese, Babylonians, and Mayas were convinced magic squares held the secrets of the universe. Magic squares are arrays filed with numbers or letters in particular arrangements. The introduction to this hefty study explains what magic squares are and provides a brief history of their importance in different cultures. The bulk of the book is an amazing study of a variety of constructions and the people who created them.
Resource Type: Recommended Non-PBS Book
Subject: Math