The World Is Not a Rectangle: A Portrait of Architect Zaha Hadid Those titles include her middle-grade autobiography, “ Reaching for the Moon ,” and two picture books, “ Counting on Katherine ” by Helaine Becker and Dow Phumiruk and “ Counting the Stars ” by Lesa Cline-Ransome and Raúl Colón. In addition to “Hidden Figures,” NASA mathematician and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Katherine Johnson is at the center of several other recent books. For younger students, there’s a young readers’ edition and a picture book version. High school students who enjoyed the 2016 blockbuster “Hidden Figures” can dive deeper into the true story of African-American women whose calculations helped launch NASA astronauts into space through Margot Lee Shetterly’s book of the same name. Below are more than 10 children’s books about diverse people who played a role in math history. A growing library of children’s nonfiction tells true stories of mathematicians who explored and advanced our understanding of numbers and patterns in real life. “If students believe that they are fundamentally disaffiliated or disidentified with a subject … why in the world would they want to engage or be motivated to continue on its study?” asked Horn.īooks revolving around math can spark curiosity and increase math engagement among kids of all ages. In the absence of diverse, relatable role models, though, kids receive messages from pop culture that math is only for certain people. According to Vanderbilt education researcher Ilana Horn, math is “inherently interesting” to all children.
Though that spark happened for Eng in college, it doesn’t have to wait that long. Through such books, Eng began to view math as “diverse, evolving, quirky and sometimes even chilling.” In short: “Math came alive.” During an independent study, a professor gave her a list of math fiction and nonfiction books to read, such as “Zero: A Biography of a Dangerous Idea” by Charles Seife. “It gave me a sense that math was a really abstract subject with no grounding,” said Eng, who is now a teacher.Īs an undergraduate math major, Eng found a new perspective. If math had a history, she never encountered it. Nor did she hear about the controversies and dramas that surrounded their ideas. As a young math student, Rachel Eng memorized formulas and theorems, but she never learned about the mathematicians who developed them.