Here are 100 books that The Number Devil fans have personally recommended if you like
The Number Devil.
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As a boy, Joseph D’Agnese grew up absolutely convinced that he was terrible at two school subjects: math and science. Lo and behold—he ended up making a career writing about both! For more than seven years, he edited a children’s math magazine for Scholastic, and was rewarded for his work by multiple Educational Press Association Awards. His children's book about the Fibonacci Sequence, Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci, is available in five languages worldwide, and as a classroom DVD. Blockhead is an Honor Book for the Mathical Book Prize—the first-ever prize for math-themed children's books. Joe’s work in science journalism has been featured twice in the prestigious annual anthology, Best American Science Writing.
Big numbers are just as amazing to kids as dinosaurs, and for the same reason. They’re so incredibly huge that they boggle the mind. This book helps kids comprehend big numbers using everyday objects and scenarios. If a million kids sat on each other’s shoulders, how high would they be able to reach? How long would it take to count to a million? Once they master a million, your kid will be well on their way to tackling quadrillions, nonillions, and, heaven help us, decillions!
“A jubilant, original picture book.” —Booklist (starred review)
Ever wonder just what a million of something means? How about a billion? Or a trillion? Marvelosissimo the mathematical magician can teach you!
How Much Is a Million? knocks complex numbers down to size in a fun, humorous way, helping children conceptualize a difficult mathematical concept. It's a math class you'll never forget.
This classic picture book is an ALA Notable Book, a Reading Rainbow Feature Selection, and a Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor Book for Illustration.
The repackage of this fun look at math concepts includes a letter from the author that…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
As a boy, Joseph D’Agnese grew up absolutely convinced that he was terrible at two school subjects: math and science. Lo and behold—he ended up making a career writing about both! For more than seven years, he edited a children’s math magazine for Scholastic, and was rewarded for his work by multiple Educational Press Association Awards. His children's book about the Fibonacci Sequence, Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci, is available in five languages worldwide, and as a classroom DVD. Blockhead is an Honor Book for the Mathical Book Prize—the first-ever prize for math-themed children's books. Joe’s work in science journalism has been featured twice in the prestigious annual anthology, Best American Science Writing.
This is a classic mathematical fable that has been brought to life by several authors. Demi sets the story in India, and it’s marvelous to watch how quickly the numbers add up when you take a single grain of rice and double it day after day. The illustrations, inspired by traditional Indian art, are breathtaking, and may well inspire your child to create their own mathematical art. At the very least, they’ll start demanding more tasty rice dishes at the dinner table.
Long ago in India, there lived a raja who believed that he was wise and fair. But every year he kept nearly all of the people's rice for himself. Then when famine came, the raja refused to share the rice, and the people went hungry. Then a village girl named Rani devises a clever plan. She does a good deed for the raja, and in return the raja lets her choose her reward. Rani asks for just one grain of rice, doubled every day for thirty days. Through the surprising power of doubling, one grain of rice grows into more…
As a boy, Joseph D’Agnese grew up absolutely convinced that he was terrible at two school subjects: math and science. Lo and behold—he ended up making a career writing about both! For more than seven years, he edited a children’s math magazine for Scholastic, and was rewarded for his work by multiple Educational Press Association Awards. His children's book about the Fibonacci Sequence, Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci, is available in five languages worldwide, and as a classroom DVD. Blockhead is an Honor Book for the Mathical Book Prize—the first-ever prize for math-themed children's books. Joe’s work in science journalism has been featured twice in the prestigious annual anthology, Best American Science Writing.
Tangrams are ancient Chinese puzzles made of up to seven interlocking geometric shapes. As Grandfather Tang assembles his polygons, the animals he creates spring to life. You’ll be astonished to learn all the creatures you can make with a square, a parallelogram, and five triangles. Wooden or plastic tangram puzzles are easy (and inexpensive) to find online, but be sure to help your child make their own out of paper so they can get solid, hands-on experience seeing how they can transform a square into so many different shapes.
This folktale told using ancient Chinese puzzles and watercolor illustrations has been beloved for over thirty years and is the perfect addition to your Father's Day reading list!
When Little Soo asks for a story, Grandfather Tang arranges the tangram pieces and two magic fox fairies spring to life. The foxes change shapes as quick as a wink, from rabbits to dogs to squirrels and geese. But their game turns dangerous when a hunter raises his bow. . . .
Originally published in 1990, Grandfather Tang’s Story will continue to delight new readers as the wonder of the tangram puzzle—and…
The Everlasting Life of Charlie Wall
by
Paul Wilborn,
It’s 1985, and Ronald Armstrong, known in the magic mushroom trade as “Trip,” takes a “sober” job as a driver for a retired Tampa mobster. His boss, Charlie Wall, has survived four attempts on his life, the last one in 1955. When Charlie falls into depression, Trip rebuilds his boss’…
I’ve always been drawn to portal stories where a character is magically transported to another world. As a child, I loved Where the Wild Things Are. Now, as a parent, I can see how cleverly Maurice Sendak builds a fantasy around a core emotional truth. This fascination stayed with me through books like The Phantom Tollbooth and Alice in Wonderland. I believe there’s something very powerful about using fantasy worlds to explore the inner lives of characters.
This is utterly unique in the way Norton Juster is able to build a fantasy world out of words, logic, and math.
As a young adult, I loved the idea of receiving a magic tollbooth and driving into a magic world. But, immediately, I found the book challenging because Milo ends up in the doldrums (a word I had never heard before). This is not just a fantasy adventure, but a cautionary tale, a character study, and a world full of puns and puzzles.
Returning to the book as an adult, I was amazed at how seamlessly Juster puts it all together.
With almost 5 million copies sold 60 years after its original publication, generations of readers have now journeyed with Milo to the Lands Beyond in this beloved classic. Enriched by Jules Feiffer’s splendid illustrations, the wit, wisdom, and wordplay of Norton Juster’s offbeat fantasy are as beguiling as ever.
“Comes up bright and new every time I read it . . . it will continue to charm and delight for a very long time yet. And teach us some wisdom, too.” --Phillip Pullman
For Milo, everything’s a bore. When a tollbooth mysteriously appears in his room, he drives through only…
My greatest passion? Human nature and the endless cycles we repeat, different on the surface yet identical at their core. We build systems, cultures, and rules, destroy them, then rebuild everything in remarkably similar forms, as though we possessed no memory of the past. I have studied human nature throughout my life, but this passion took shape at university through cultural anthropology and comparative theology. Over thirty years, it has guided my work in developing human potential and talent, and has been refined further through working with thousands of people from more than 200 countries and territories. It is now the lens through which I write speculative fiction.
Science fiction can be hilarious without becoming merely ridiculous. It can bend the genre’s conventions without losing its way, and unleash its imagination while still taking sharp aim at human arrogance.
I read this book before it was widely recognized as a classic, and immediately loved its mixture of adventure, unforgettable characters, and jokes so brilliant that they became cultural touchstones around the world.
Most of all, I loved never being able to imagine what would happen on the next page. Few books offer the same combination of speed, adventure, unpredictability, and genuine laughter. Ever since I finished it, I have kept a small towel nearby, just in case the world ends.
This box set contains all five parts of the' trilogy of five' so you can listen to the complete tales of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Bebblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android! Travel through space, time and parallel universes with the only guide you'll ever need, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Read by Stephen Fry, actor, director, author and popular audiobook reader, and Martin Freeman, who played Arthur Dent in film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He is well known as Tim in The Office.
The set also includes a bonus DVD Life, the Universe and…
I’ve always felt myself to be different, odd, and a bit of a loner. As a child, people said I was "too clever by half," and I both hated and loved being able to understand things that other kids did not. Being good at maths and science in a girls’ boarding school does not make you friends! Escaping all that, I became a psychologist and, after a dramatic out-of-body experience, began studying lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, psychic claims, and all sorts of weird and wonderful experiences. This is why I love all these books about exceptional children.
What I love about this book is that Christopher is such an unusual child and sees the world in ways that most of us do not.
In reading this bizarre and disturbing mystery story, we begin to see the world differently ourselves. I like, too, the fact that what is different about him is never named – it’s not some specific diagnosis or categorization – he is just Christopher, the odd, mathematically gifted, strangely reacting, teenager.
When he becomes terrified of what we might take as quite ordinary events and places, I begin to feel some of his difference – to feel what it might be like to be so much an outsider. It helped me to remember that we are all different.
'Mark Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement... Wise and bleakly funny' Ian McEwan
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's Syndrome. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the…
Delve into this internationally best-selling series, now complete! A fast paced laugh-out-loud mix of Urban Fantasy and Mystery.
I can tell when you’re lying. Every. Single. Time. I’m Jinx, a PI hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar–yet my gut…
I don't write within received categories: our lives aren't lived in categories, but are full of varying realities, whether of home, childhood, marriage, parenthood, fantasy, dream, work, or relaxation, and more all mixed together. I can't write in any other way, however dominant a particular strand or age may be on the surface in a given work.Orpheus Rising may have a child hero, and a fantastic, elegant Edwardian Elephant as a spirit guide, but it let me tell a story of love lost and regained, of family broken and remade, of a father in despair and remade, themes of real importance in any life.
We absorb this tale, like Peter Pan's, from childhood, and it provides us all with a leaning to light-hearted fantasy and a story pattern of leaving the real world and returning to it. An adventure may begin by going through a wardrobe as in the first Narnia novel, or into and out of Tom Bombadil's Old Forest in Tolkien. Alice goes down a rabbit hole. There are rabbit holes, wardrobes, forests, sailboats.... The world Alice gets to is full of strangeness appealed to me for Orpheus Rising whose characters have a similar variety.
When Alice sees the White Rabbit running by on the river bank, she follows him, tumbling down a Rabbit Hole into a magical world where nothing is ever as it seems...
Lewis Carroll's classic story has delighted children since 1865. One hundred and fifty years since its first publication, Hodder celebrates in style with this sumptuous new edition, illustrated by Rebecca Dautremer, whose dreamlike illustrations bring vibrant new life to Carroll's beloved characters. The original text appears complete and unabridged.
Rebecca Dautremer is the celebrated illustrator of The Secret Lives of Princesses.
I’ve been obsessed with space exploration since watching the Apollo missions as a child. As an adult, I devoured every book I could find on the subject while nursing my own desire to create “what if” stories that were not too far removed from present day. A career in managing flight operations gave me some appreciation of the technical challenges and personality types, experiences which I’ve extrapolated into my fiction. Some of my novels have been described as “Airportfor the 21st century” and “Apollo 13 meets The Hunt for Red October.” The books on this list were the foundation of my early research and remain favorites to this day.
The basis for the movie October Sky, this isn’t an account of the space program so much as it is a study of the types of people drawn to it, in particular a young man in 1950s West Virginia striving for something more than a life in the coal mines. The culture shock of Sputnik sets him and his friends off into increasingly dangerous—and often hilarious—experiments in amateur rocketry.
Set against an awkward adolescence in a small coal town, it’s a vivid illustration of the obstacles that must be overcome to break free of the cycles life can impose. The screen adaptation takes some liberties, most notably with Hickam’s father. The book portrays him as being cautiously supportive, if understandably skeptical, of his teenage son’s unlikely obsession.
Three years in the life of Homer 'Sonny' Hickam, from the moment he sees the Sputnik satellite overhead in West Virginia to his successful launch of a prizewinning rocket.
In 1957, Coalwood, West Virginia, was a town the post-war boom never quite reached, and dominated by the black steel towers of the mine. For fourteen-year-old Homer 'Sonny' Hickam there are only two routes in life: a college football scholarship, or a life underground. But from the moment the town turns out to watch the world's first space satellite, Sputnik, as it…
Mario Livio is an astrophysicist and author of seven popular science books, including the bestsellers The Golden Ratio and Brilliant Blunders. He worked for 24 years (till 2015) with the Hubble Space Telescope, and published more than 500 scientific papers. He lectures regularly to the general public, and has appeared on television programs ranging from 60 Minutes to NOVA to The Daily Show.
An enthralling, fictional description of a young scientist (Einstein) and his dreams/thoughts about space, time, relativity, and the nature of reality. The book fictionalizes Einstein’s dreams in 1905, his “Annus Mirabilis” (“Miracle Year”), in which he wrote four fundamental papers, including one on his theory of Special Relativity. While this is a work of fiction, the physics concepts are beautifully explained.
It is ten minutes past six by the invisible clock on the wall. The young patents clerk sprawls in his chair, dreaming about time. He is Albert Einstein, and in his dreams he imagines new worlds, in which time can be circular, or flow backwards, or slow down at higher altitudes.
The authoritative but accessible history of the birth of modern American intelligence in World War II that treats not just one but all of the various disciplines: spies, codebreakers, saboteurs.
Told in a relatable style that focuses on actual people, it was a New Yorker "Best of 2022" selection and…
I have enjoyed mathematics and writing since I’ve been a kid, not only enjoying doing research in mathematics but assisting others to appreciate and enjoy mathematics. Along the way, I’ve gained an interest in the history of mathematics and the mathematicians who created mathematics. Perhaps most important, my primary goal has been to show others how enjoyable mathematics can be. Mathematics has given me the marvelous opportunity to meet and work with other mathematicians who have a similar passion for mathematics.
Have you ever been to a mathematics lecture where the speaker wore a tuxedo and baffled the audience with his mystifying knowledge of numbers? Well, I have and the speaker was Arthur Benjamin, who combined mathematics and magic. He even displayed this knowledge with Stephen Colbert on his earlier show The Colbert Report. It is our good fortune that he describes much of this mathematical wizardry in this fascinating book.
A New York Times Bestseller Arthur Benjamin . . . joyfully shows you how to make nature's numbers dance." ,Bill Nye The Magic of Math is the math book you wish you had in school. Using a delightful assortment of examples,from ice-cream scoops and poker hands to measuring mountains and making magic squares,this book revels in key mathematical fields including arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and calculus, plus Fibonacci numbers, infinity, and, of course, mathematical magic tricks. Known throughout the world as the mathemagician," Arthur Benjamin mixes mathematics and magic to make the subject fun, attractive, and easy to understand for math…
