Many people seem interested in exploring math, real math, with kids. This is a nice, free PDF book with some great ideas.
These are not free, but they are excellent.
This is a brilliant elementary series for teaching math. While it makes a great homeschool curriculum, it's fun enough that a kid who goes to public or private school might enjoy doing it in his free time.
For a kid who loves math, Why Pi? and Go Figure! are sure hits.
What are your favorite kid-friendly math books? Alternatively, what math-related idea or experience do you think a kid would particularly enjoy?
10 comments:
For the older (i.e. mid to older teenage) kids, there's always "Flatland", which deals with concepts useful not only in geometry, but also in physics & computer graphics.
"Flatland" is entertaining too.
I don't know about enjoy, but I got my daughter to learn her times tables by asking her, e.g., what's 6 times 8? If she didn't give the answer relatively quickly, she had to write on a small dry erase board 6x8=48. Then we'd erase it, and keep going with random other ones. The ones she missed, I'd come back to a couple turns later, to reinforce.
Freeman, what do you think of the Khan Academy?
I love Khan Academy. If a kid is really into math, he can explore it a bit there for free. For a kid who is having trouble, he can practice and watch explanations and many times as he'd like without feeling like he's being watched. Plus, if someone is teaching a concept and the student is having trouble, Khan is often an easy way to bring up an alternative explanation of the same concept.
Here's something I think kids would love: Poincare's circle.
Shit, I binged it to make sure I was spelling Poincare' right, and...I guess they don't call it Poincare's circle anymore, but Poincare's disk model. Whatevs.
It's a representation of another universe -- one that behaves according to the rules of hyperbolic geometry. It's like a window into another dimension, where things don't behave as you'd expect: In a plane, there are an infinite number of lines through a given point, parallel to a given line, for example.
You couldn't get to deep into it, but the basics are approachable to a high school geometry student.
I'll have to look that up, Pasta.
Someone was introducing one son to the Fano plane last week.
The late Martin Gardner has a number of fun books. Some are Dover publications (i.e., extremely inexpensive), such as:
My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles
Entertaining Mathematical Puzzles
Perplexing Puzzles and Tantalizing Teasers
He also has a large number of books which collect his Mathematical Games columns from Scientific American (from back when that magazine used to be good). These are all excellent.
Another interesting author is Raymond Smullyan, who has written a lot of books of logic puzzles, like Alice in Puzzleland, The Lady or the Tiger?, and What is the Name of This Book? He has also written some serious university level logic and philosophy texts, so check before you buy.
An extremely wonderful book is Thomas Korner's The Pleasures of Counting, which would work well for a high schooler or mathematically inclined middle schooler. The topics range from cholera outbreaks in London, the enigma machine, to the question of whether to convoy during World War II.
Oh my god, I'd forgotten all about Raymond Smullyan.
He wrote a book called "The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes" with some of the greatest chess puzzles ever -- they weren't conventional mate-in-4 puzzles, they were what Smullyan called "retrograde analysis."
I'll have to see if I still have it. I could scan a couple of pages and do a post on it.
Maybe I can recapture some of that lightning-in-a-bottle excitement of the dripping pitch post.
Pastafarian:
He did a second chess retrograde analysis book, too: Chess Mysteries of the Arabian Nights. They're both lots of fun.
I love Gardner. I'll have to check out these others, especially the counting book.
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