It’s finally summer!  The long and exciting school year was immediately followed by our 5 week summer school program.  So, for me, I’m 5 weeks late but I am finally enjoying some downtime with my family.

When I first became a mom I assumed I would be spending time teaching my kids the basics;  after all, I am a math teacher. When I was pregnant, I spent so much time looking for cool activities, and at-home lessons on letters, colors, numbers, because I had this expectation of myself as a Teacher-Mom.  All I can say is that I am so grateful that we have the best daycare provider that has taught my boys most of those things because I learned very quickly that I am less “Teacher” and more “Mom” with them (as it should be).

But, I definitely can’t help myself when it comes to reinforcing the math skills in my children.  My boys knew their numbers and how to count well before they could recognize colors and letters.  Our boys’ playroom is well stocked with math games, logic puzzles, building blocks, tangrams, and several number related children’s books.  

One day I came across a book while shopping on Amazon called, The Boy Who Loved Math, the Improbable Life of Paul Erdos written by Deborah Heiligman and illustrated by LeUyen Pham.  A book about a boy who loved math? This boy mama couldn’t add it to my shopping cart fast enough.  In fact, I bought it so fast I didn’t even realize it was a book about Paul Erdos. It came in the mail 2 days later, courtesy of Amazon Prime, and it was our bedtime story that night.

I thought I was just adding to our library of children’s books.  I had no idea how much joy this book would bring!  It was published in 2013 and I wish I found it sooner! 

I love it so much and here’s why:

1. It’s a true story about Paul Erdos, a real mathematician that’s influenced and improved our lives through the math he’s done and shared with others.  I love that it brings to light the importance of collaboration. Paul Erdos spent his life traveling around the world working on math with other mathematicians because he knew this was the way to develop, “…more and better math.”
2. It makes reference to more advanced math than I’ve seen in the math related books we have at home.  My 5 year old son is now asking me about negative numbers and prime numbers;  this makes my heart happy because this book has sparked curiosity in my son. He asked me what infinity is and I wish I had a picture of my son’s face as he tried to process the information.  What better way for a young mind to learn? It makes reference to Number Theory, Combinatorics, Set Theory, and the Probabalistic Method; we’re not just counting in this children’s book!
3. It’s written in a beautiful way that makes math approachable and interesting.  I love how Heiligman describes Erdos’ curiosity about numbers and his efforts to be a problem solver.  Heiligman uses math terminology in ways a mathematician would, “Mama loves Paul to infinity” and “…all day, 100% of the time.”
4. But hands down, my favorite part of this book are the *beautiful* illustrations.  LeUyen Pham is clearly a talented artist but what is most impressive is that there is meaningful math illustrated all throughout the book.  There’s even a thorough description of the illustrations at the end of the book.  This is the beauty of mathematics that I want my boys to see:
   

   What looks like a young Erdos chasing after an arbitrary set of floating numbers is actually a list of the Harmonic Primes.

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  I love young Paul’s dreamy gaze as he thinks about even and odd numbers.

  

  The dotted lines on this page are a solution to one of Erdos’ problems he posed to mathematicians:  Can a square be dissected into squares of different sizes?

I can’t appreciate this book enough–it’s so thoughtfully written, it’s light and fun for kids, and I’m loving the math written in the story lines and drawn in the illustrations.  I’ll confess, I don’t remember much about Paul Erdos in my own studies that it’s inspired me to learn more about him. This story is adorable and I’m happy to read it to my boys and inspire them to dream about numbers.

~PV~