I was a girl who looked under rocks. Besides caring about crawling things and forests, I liked to read and write about history, which became the passion I followed into college and a career. No regrets, but I sometimes wonder what might have become of me if an interest in science was more encouraged and I was nudged past my fear of math.
In Grasping Mysteries: Girls Who Loved Math, free verse introduces some scientists who always found joy in math as well as those who found parts of it tough, but kept at it until they saw its beauty. Paths taken include astronomy, statistics, and physics, shown in the context of lives in which friendship and family matter a lot, too.
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This classic book, in board book form or paperback, is spare of words with bold pictures. A red carpet and green walls are set against a child’s bright yellow gown. A tender story mixes in elementary math, offering the charm of counting backwards. Soothing for bedtime, it’s one of my favorite gifts for the very youngest.
This is a busy book in the best of ways. Counting is a start toward exploring the beauty and joy of creeping or flying bugs and the places they make as their homes. Honestly, what can be more fun to count than a variety of colorful bugs? We’re introduced to various ways to reach one hundred, an exhilarating number to aim for.
There’s plenty to count on the pages, but this book soars by stressing the repetition of events in the lifetimes of spiders, snakes, kangaroos, and other animals. The word “amazing” in the title sets a bar that’s met as we learn that a woodpecker will drill thirty holes in trees. A giraffe will sport 200 spots. And there’s much more for eager readers to count.
The daughter of a poet and a scientific mother, Ada is shown growing up in the early 1800s with both imagination and a bent toward math. As a girl, she dreams of building a steam-powered flying horse. She’s fascinated by machines and eager to tour factories. Seeing how cards are used to set patterns for cloth on looms inspires her to create the first computer program. Whimsical illustrations adorn clear explanations of calculations. At the book’s end we see Ada in red-striped stockings and green goggles flying over symbols of some of what her ideas will bring to the world.
Here’s another picture book featuring a woman from another century who loved math. The story of this trailbreaker is told lyrically with the title occasionally echoing. We see the failures inevitable when one sets a difficult mathematical quest -- to understand patterns in vibrations -- as well as setbacks due to gender bias. Painting and collages are joyfully animated, including numbers hurtling through the background.
5,215 authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them. Browse their picks for the best books about women in mathematics, counting, and mathematicians.
We think you will like ADA Byron Lovelace & the Thinking Machine, Counting on Katherine: How Katherine Johnson Saved Apollo 13, and The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars if you like this list.
From Vivian's list on The best children's books for budding inventors.
Picture books are a unique genre because there are really three people who participate in telling the story – the author, the illustrator, and the children who are reading and/or listening. With each page turn, ADA Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine brings us to another time and allows us to become part of that history – a time before computers and other electronic devices proliferated our lives and before women in science were accepted. The lush illustrations and the lyrical text capture my heart each time I read this book, and I love how we get a small peek into the life of the main character’s famous parents, Lord Byron, and Lady Anne Isabella Milbanke.
From Laura's list on The best children's books to introduce real scientists.
I picked this book in part because many kids, including my own daughter, are fascinated by space and will be intrigued by Katherine Johnson calculating the course of moon landings. I also picked it because I very deliberately included a mathematician in Who Is a Scientist?, and I think mathematicians are often neglected in round-ups of books about scientists. My third reason is that this book does a great job of explaining the math that “human computers” like Katherine did, and why this math was important for NASA to send rockets into space.
From Emily's list on The best books on historical women in science.
This is a very readable account of a group of women working on a project at Harvard University’s observatory in the late nineteenth century. The project involved studying glass-plate negatives of the sky and in doing so learning more about the night sky, the composition of stars, and their evolution. Through the story of these women, Sobel shows the extent to which the university supported and nurtured them, it also brilliantly brings to life these women using their own words to show their awareness of certain injustices. This book is a great way into to understanding science as it properly is: more often than not collaborative and collective rather than the isolating work of a stereotypical lone genius. It is also a great story, engagingly told.