I wrote this review for FUN Books in June of 98.
When I returned from the post office, the first thing I did was hand
this book to my eldest son, Alex (11 yo), and tell him that I wanted
his opinion of it. I spoke to him 10 minutes later and received
no reply. He was totally engrossed.
As a little background, Alex left school 3 months into first grade.
Those three months turned him from a math lover into a math hater. It
took a long 3 years of not forcing math on him to start to reverse
this process. This makes his reaction to this book the more notable.
It was a day and a half before I got my hands on it again. True, it
was only to have my other son, Nicky (7 1/2), insist that I read it
to him. We soon happily "wasted" yet more time constructing mobius
strips, cutting them apart, and trying to tape two together to make a
klein bottle (unsuccessfully, I might add). My husband then took over
when the book discussed "pi", and he and Nicky measured circular
objects, both the circumference and the diameter, and calculated the
ratio. Nicky was quite impressed that it came out the same.
From the mobius strips to the Golden Rectangle, Fibonacci sequences to
fractals, this book is a pleasant presentation of math subjects not
generally made accessible to young children, as well as containing
more conventional topics such as tangrams, the abacus, mazes, magic
squares, and logic problems. The topics were greatly enhanced, in
Alex's opinion, by being couched in stories about Penrose the Cat,
Leonard the Turtle, and Dr. Spacemath.
This book would be greatly improved by references at the end of each
topic indicating where the avid can pursue the subject.
--Pat Willette
jones@megalink.net