I’m a storyteller. I’ve told stories through journalism, theater, film, and comics. When I was the editor of a film magazine, Scenario: “The Magazine of the Art of Screenwriting” I interviewed filmmakers about the craft of telling a great story. As a journalist, I love original sources and voices, for the way they tell a personal version of history. They say history is told by the winners. I prefer the reverse angle—history told, not by the “losers” but by true, strong, authentic voices. I somehow want to read, reveal, recommend, and illuminate marginalized voices.
Mandy Keifetz’s book is about grief over a lover’s suicide, but her voice is so wise and amusing that her story didn’t make me sad.
I’ve lost humans; we all have. I lost my best friend and my best dog. How can we grasp what was there and now is gone? I instantly related to this story—the author is a fellow New Jersey girl living at the misfit margins and drifting along, gig by gig. She’s scrappy and willing to do what it takes to survive. I love being swept into a curious mind through a book.
I enjoyed the book’s spiral narrative, which drills down on loss with the sense of a dog chasing its own tail in fury and glee. And then, yes, there is Pascal’s Wager. Why not keep one foot on the side of belief in an afterlife or soul’s lingering on? What do you have…
Pascal's Wager and performing fleas. The Haunted Mansion of Long Branch and an old dockside bar. Raceway Park and a pristine 1971 Plymouth Road Runner. A cat named Altamont. These are all that stand between a young mathematician and madness as she attempts to make sense of her lover's suicide. Narrow margins, you say? Not much to place between a slip of a broken-hearted Jersey Girl and the Abyss? Indeed, it is a treacherous twelve seconds on the quarter mile, hilarious and harrowing by turn. Blink and you'll miss it.
I have had a long, fruitful career as a business leader, entrepreneur, and inventor in the energy and chemicals industry with seven scientific patents. I'm the founder/CEO of Chem Systems, Inc., lectured at MIT about entrepreneurship and innovation, and recently wrote a book exploring industrial inventions tracing back to the Industrial Revolution. All inventors share the same qualities: they see opportunities, stay persistent, and maintain their faith in the value of their innovation. The books on this list celebrate those qualities and honor the innovators who embody them. The authors highlight the common threads binding past, present, and future together, showing how humanity's progress depends on innovation.
I've always been inspired by the story of the Black women mathematicians at NASA — the "human computers" who calculated the formulas to launch rockets and astronauts into space. Shetterly's book brings them to life, making their feats even more remarkable, especially given their tools (adding machines, pencils, and slide rules) and challenges (they worked in the Jim Crow South).
The four amazing women the book focuses on—Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden—deserved to be brought to light. There's a movie version that conveys their brilliance in a dramatized way, but the book gets into depth in ways the movie can't. It's a great narrative about what it takes to be an innovator, no matter if you're a woman or a man.
Soon to be a major motion picture starring Golden Globe-winner Taraji P. Henson and Academy Award-winners Octavia Spencer and Kevin Costner Set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA's African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America's space program-and whose contributions have been unheralded, until now. Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as "Human Computers," calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American…
I was born in Odessa, USSR, a Southern Ukrainian city that many more people know now than when my family and I immigrated in 1977. Growing up in the US, everything I read about Soviet immigrants was either cliched, stereotyped, or plain wrong. A 1985 short film, Molly’s Pilgrim, about a (presumably Jewish) Soviet immigrant girl showed her wearing a native peasant costume and a scarf on her head which, for some reason, Americans insisted on calling a “babushka.” “Babushka” means “grandmother” in Russian. Why would you wear one of those on your head? I was desperate for more realistic portrayals. So I wrote my own. And the five books I picked definitely offer them.
Math reigned supreme in the USSR. I was never particularly good at it. I had to immigrate to the United States to marry an American nuclear engineer turned math and physics teacher. In Divide Me By Zero the heroine’s widowed mother describes love in mathematical terms. The passage reminded me of my husband. I forced him to listen to me read it out loud to him. “Wow,” he said. "That’s hot." Read this book for the heart-wrenching story—and the hot math.
As a young girl, Katya Geller learned from her mother that math was the answer to everything. Now, approaching forty, she finds this wisdom tested: she has lost the love of her life, she is in the middle of a divorce, and has just found out that her mother is dying. Nothing is adding up.
With humor, intelligence, and unfailing honesty, Katya traces back her life’s journey: her childhood in Soviet Russia, her parents’ great love, the death of her father, her mother’s career as a renowned mathematician, and their immigration to the United…
As a child, I loved stories about people who accomplished extraordinary things – I read our set of encyclopedias from cover to cover. Those first forays into research stood me in good stead when I started writing nonfiction picture books about people who believed that nothing is impossible if you can imagine it – people like Robert Goddard who climbed a cherry tree when he was 13 and looked at the moon and decided he was going to build a vehicle that could take people there. As a teacher and as a parent, I read picture books on a daily basis, and as a writer for children, I love sparking the curiosity of young readers.
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.
Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the famous romantic poet, Lord Byron, develops her creativity through science and math. When she meets Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first mechanical computer, Ada understands the machine better than anyone else and writes the world's first computer program in order to demonstrate its capabilities.
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.
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.
From nonfiction stars Diane Stanley and Jessie Hartland comes a beautifully illustrated biography of Ada Lovelace, who is known as the first computer programmer. Two hundred years ago, a daughter was born to the famous poet, Lord Byron, and his mathematical wife, Annabella. Like her father, Ada had a vivid imagination and a creative gift for connecting ideas in original ways. Like her mother, she had a passion for science, math, and machines. It was a very good combination. Ada hoped that one day she could do something important with her creative and nimble mind. A hundred years before the…
I am a former science teacher and science writer with a PhD in neuroscience. I have published thirty books for young readers, many with scientific themes. In elementary school, I was amazed by seeing pond water under a microscope. In high school, I sat in biology class feeling like my brain might explode from realizing how incredible it is that trillions of tiny cells work together to make up our bodies. I want to help my young readers find the same joy in connecting with science that I did, and to have that same feeling that their brains might explode—in a good way—from learning new, astonishing information.
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.
Meet Katherine Johnson, the mathematical genius who helped make the historic Apollo 11 moon landings possible and made sure that Apollo 13 returned home safely when the mission was in critical danger. Counting on Katherine is a beautiful biography, sure to inspire young readers.
Winner of the information book category of the UKLA Book Awards 2020.
As a child, Katherine loved to count. She counted the steps on the road, the number of dishes and spoons she washed in the kitchen sink, everything! Boundless, curious, and excited by calculations, young Katherine longed to know as much as she could about…
I’ve always adored science, and spent my teenage years searching for female role models in the sci-fi and popular science books I loved. I started out at university studying Aerospace Engineering, but upon discovering a severe allergy to lab reports, transferred to a Frankensteinian degree of my own making entitled, “Narratives of Science in Fiction and History,” which examined the interactions of science fiction and scientific history. Fascinated by nineteenth-century paleontology in particular, and wanting to learn more about women’s involvement in science during this period, I proposed as my final year project a joint creative writing/research project which would eventually become my first novel, Our Hideous Progeny.
Although this book centers a fictional scientist rather than a real one, the emotions and passion that the protagonist, Katherine, experiences feel all too real.
As a lifelong fan of mathematics, I’ve often felt that math is one of the most maligned branches of science, so I adored the way that Chung portrays Katherine’s love for the subject and the beauty of a good equation. (You can really tell that she herself has experience in the field!)
I also loved the way that Chung delved into the difficulties Katherine experiences as a woman of color in science in the decades after WWII, from outright racism and misogyny to the kind of constant, low-grade doubt and lack of support that can make being a minority in STEM so difficult.
'A young woman's battle for acceptance in a male-dominated world; her misadventures in love; and her torturous journey to track down her real parents in Germany' Mail on Sunday Best New Fiction
'What had seemed to be a Hidden Figures-style female-genius-in-a-male-world narrative turns into a thrilling back-to-my-roots mystery' Daily Telegraph
From childhood, Katherine knows she is different, and that her parents are not who they seem to be. But as she grows up and becomes a mathematician, she faces the most human of problems - who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of…
I am an astronomer and astrobiologist, and my field of work leads me to wonder about the origin of life in the universe and how scientific discoveries (and especially those related to space) affect culture, people's lives, or even civilization itself. All of the books listed here focus precisely on answering some of these concerns, which is why I find them extremely interesting.
I find it a lovely book that highlights the work of many hidden figures in the field of astronomy for the mere fact of being women. The book shows the groundbreaking work of a group of women astronomers at the Harvard College Observatory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who made significant contributions to the field of astronomy.
I always find Sobel's prose fascinating and very enjoyable to read; I love the way she writes. Drawing from letters, diaries, and scientific papers, Sobel paints a vivid portrait of these pioneering women and their remarkable discoveries. Reading the book is like being present in that time.
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Dava Sobel, the "inspiring" (People), little-known true story of women's landmark contributions to astronomy
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
Named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Economist, Smithsonian, Nature, and NPR's Science Friday
Nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
"A joy to read." -The Wall Street Journal
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or "human computers," to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the…
I’ve always read speculative fiction for its new perspectives on reality. Now that I write it too, I appreciate the fabulous minds that create these unique views of our universe even more. Experience in higher education and instructional design led me to appreciate organization that flows at the speed and direction of thought. I adore a well-turned phrase and a well-built world, and I hope this list leads you to a new experience of that same joy.
Many readers fear math, and this action-packed adventure may give you new reasons to fear it. The protagonist’s superpower is super-fast mental calculation that lets her dodge bullets and kick incredible quantities of butt in a fight. Even more devious minds are opposing her. If you’ve ever wondered what use your high school physics and calculus classes were, this novel offers some explanation, although you can appreciate the story without them. This is, and I cannot stress this enough, a fun and exciting tale that treats math like magic and totally gets away with doing so.
ZERO SUM GAME Best of Lists: * Best Books of the Month at The Verge, Book Riot, Unbound Worlds, SYFY, & Kirkus * The Mary Sue Book Club Pick * Library Journal Best Debuts of Fall and Winter
A blockbuster near-future thriller, S.L. Huang's Zero Sum Game introduces a math-genius mercenary who finds herself being manipulated by someone possessing unimaginable power…
Cas Russell is good at math. Scary good. The vector calculus blazing through her head lets her smash through armed men twice her size and dodge every bullet in a gunfight, and she'll take any job for the right…
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.
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.
The true story of eighteenth-century mathematician Sophie Germain, who solved the unsolvable to achieve her dream.
When her parents took away her candles to keep their young daughter from studying math...nothing stopped Sophie. When a professor discovered that the homework sent to him under a male pen name came from a woman...nothing stopped Sophie. And when she tackled a math problem that male scholars said would be impossible to solve...still, nothing stopped Sophie.
For six years Sophie Germain used her love of math and her undeniable determination to test equations that would predict patterns of vibrations. She eventually became the…
