Explaining math demands great visuals. I should know: I explain math for a living, and I cannot draw. Like, at all. The LA Times art director once compared my cartoons to the work of children and institutionalized patients. (He printed them anyway.) In the nerdier corners of the internet, I’m known as the “Math with Bad Drawings” guy, and as a purveyor of artless art, I’ve developed an eye for the good stuff: striking visuals that bring mathematical concepts to life. Here are five books that blow my stick figures out of the water. (But please buy my book anyway, if for no deeper reason than pity.)
I wrote
Math Games with Bad Drawings: 75 1/4 Simple, Challenging, Go-Anywhere Games--And Why They Matter
Picking up this short picture book, I expected a dose of Phantom Toolbooth-esque wordplay. Not at all. This five-minute love story, about a line yearning for a dot, somehow enlarges into a meditation on geometric structure itself. From such a brief book, I didn’t expect new insights about how simple geometry underlies our most intricate thinking—but then again, that’s what delightful visuals will do for you.
Once upon a time there was a sensible straight line who was hopelessly in love with a beautiful dot. But the dot, though perfect in every way, only had eyes for a wild and unkempt squiggle. All of the line's romantic dreams were in vain, until he discovered...angles! Now, with newfound self-expression, he can be anything he wants to be--a square, a triangle, a parallelogram....And that's just the beginning!First published in 1963 and made into an Academy Award-winning animated short film, here is a supremely witty love story with a twist that reveals profound truths about relationships--both human and mathematical--sure…
I had to read this one twice. First, with just the pictures, it’s a lighthearted steampunk fantasy: episodic tales of Victorian humor and cool mathematics. Second, reading the copious footnotes and endnotes, it’s something heftier: an exhaustively researched account of two pivotal figures in math history. Padua’s art is so skillful I’m not even jealous, just awed.
Winner of the British Book Design and Production Award for Graphic Novels Winner of the Neumann Prize in the History of Mathematics
In The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage Sydney Padua transforms one of the most compelling scientific collaborations into a hilarious set of adventures
Meet two of Victorian London's greatest geniuses... Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron: mathematician, gambler, and proto-programmer, whose writings contained the first ever appearance of general computing theory, a hundred years before an actual computer was built. And Charles Babbage, eccentric inventor of the Difference Engine, an enormous clockwork calculating machine that would have…
I admire James Gleick’s Chaos. Who doesn’t? It’s a landmark book, a masterpiece of science writing. But let’s be real: it’s not exactly a beach read, is it? If Chaos is a complex aged wine, then this book is a simple autumn cider: a photographic collage of nature’s fractals, sweetened with a splash of Gleick’s lyrical prose.
Nature's Chaos presents 80-100 colour photographs by Eliot Porter, each highlighting a different element of his lifelong fascination with what he calls the jumble and disorder in nature.
I stumbled on this in a used bookstore. What a find! The old-school, kid-friendly illustrations lead swiftly from simple beginnings (“What happens when you stretch a painting?”) to the depths of undergraduate topology. I haven’t used this in the classroom yet, but honestly, I could imagine busting it out with anyone from first-graders to first-year PhD candidates.
Bernard Marks and Martha Alford met by chance. The odds were long that they would hit it off. That wasn’t in the cards they’d been dealt at birth. But, as gamblers in love, they rolled the dice. And then they worked hard, took risks, caught lucky breaks, built satisfying careers,…
I adore these images. Each is like a tiny memoir wrapped in a graph. Even beyond the puzzle-like pleasure of decoding them, I love Rial’s playful use of real objects. Coffee rings form a Venn diagram about coffee addiction. Floss traces a line graph on dental hygiene. Half-eaten cheese sticks become the bars on a chart of cheese consumption. A delicious book, in every sense!
This is a book of questions with answers, over-answers, and many charts: Did I screw up? How do I achieve work-life balance? Am I eating too much cheese? Do I have too many plants? Like a conversation with your non-judgmental best friend, Michelle Rial delivers a playful take on the little dilemmas that loom large in the mind of every adult through artful charts and funny, insightful questions.
* Building on her popular Instagram account @michellerial, Am I Overthinking This? brings whimsical charm to topics big and small
* Offers solidarity for the stressed, answers…
It's the ultimate mathematical game chest: 70-plus games, playable with just paper, pens, and the occasional handful of coins. Drawing from Argentine puzzle magazines, Japanese schoolyards, Parisian universities, and everywhere in between, I hand-picked the games with three adjectives in mind: (1) fun, (2) thought-provoking, and (3) easy to play. Each takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. Better yet, each brings out the best in human thought, from cognitive psychology to quantum mechanics.
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
