In “Number Mania: A Visual Exploration Of 0 To 100” ($19.99 in hardcover from Odd Dot/Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group) Lape and Medina provide a carnival of number lore on every page not just for kids ages 6 through 12 but for adults as well.
We’re surrounded by numerals, in street signs and digital clocks, but things get really interesting when we start counting. “The number representing a group of objects only has meaning if there’s somebody looking at the objects, counting them, or wondering, ‘How many are there?’”
Each number has its own mathematical personality and each colorful, whimsical page looks at how the number is expressed in other languages, its factors, a bit of numerical history, and a section that’s just wild about that number. There are 64 colors in many Crayon packages; Forty-Four is a small town in Arkansas; “The traditional gift for a 70th wedding anniversary is something made of platinum (element 78).” Bowling balls can’t weigh more than 16 pounds.
You’ll see 36 on a yardstick, of course, but also “there are 36 counties in Oregon. There are 36 black keys (and 52 white keys) on a piano.” In Judaism, “the commandment to be kind to strangers is found 36 times in the Torah.”
Zeroing in on nothing, Lape writes that “The idea of ‘none’ being a number took a long time to catch on…. The first known use of a small circle to represent zero was in 876 CE in India…. Now we have a bunch of words that mean 0: nada, zilch, zip, diddly, and diddly-squat! … There used to be a town called Zero in Iowa—but sadly, its population is now 0.”
You’ll have fun with this book. Count on it.
Scott Lape will have a book signing at the Chico Barnes & Noble on Saturday, November 23 at 1:00 p.m. And listen to a recent Nancy’s Bookshelf interview with the author by host Nancy Wiegman at www.mynspr.org/show/nancys-bookshelf.
