Book Celebration

To celebrate the release of the newest great and greatest new children's math book... by which I mean Which One Doesn't Belong? by the #MTBoS' own Christopher Danielson, of course... I thought I'd recap some of my favorite math picture books. This list also has MTBoS support, as I solicited suggestions from the MTBoS for a colleague.

Get yours here.

The request was for a parent with a mathematically curious child (really, could be anyone then, am I right?) of 4 or 5 years.

Top:

• Moebius Noodles, Maria Droujkova's great book about big math ideas to explore. There were articles about calculus in kindergarten when it first came out.
• Great new book: Which One Doesn¹t Belong. OK, I'll say more. I love this book because it's clever and pretty, but also because it can teach you how to read mathematically rich literature.
• Math Curse, Lane and Scieska: just the best math book ever written. Nearly anything can be a problem, you know.

Great:

• Anno's Mysterious Multiplying Jar, or anything by Mitsumasa Anno. Just charming books, and lovely besides.
• Spaghetti and Meatballs For All, Marilyn Burns: my favorite of the explicitly mathematical genre. Tang and Murphy have their place but Burns is the queen of the genre. (Greedy Triangle, Smarty Pants, $1 Word...) 
• Princess of the genre, Elinor Pinczes: One Hundred Hungry Ants, A Remainder of One, ...
• Infinity and Me by Kate Hosford
• Tessallation!  by Emily Grosvenor
• Grandfather Tang’s Story, by Ann Tompert
• The Dot and the Line, by Norton Juster

Biography:

• Paul Erdos, The Boy Who Loved Math by Deborah Helligman
• Fibonacci, Blockhead by Joseph D'Agnese
• Eratosthanes, The Librarian Who Measured the Earth by Katherine Lasky
• Einstein usually gets lumped in here. Not a mathematician, technically, but if you're being that technical, loosen up! Try Odd Boy Out or On a Beam of Light

What to do:

• Chris Hunter has a bunch of recommendations plus how to use them.
• Another post with a lot of suggestions at Algebra's Friend
• Suzanne Alejandre suggested the old (aka classic) NCTM guide, Welchman-Tischler's book, might provide ideas? (She found a digital copy; use the NEXT button)
• Marilyn Burns (herself) just suggested this starting point from PBS

Possibly for older, but like Madeline L'Engle, I think people underestimate kids:

• The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norman Juster
• The Man Who Counted, by Malba Tahan
• Flatland, by Edwin Abbott 
• The Number Devil, by Hans Magnus Enzensberger
• The Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat, by Theoni Pappas
• The Cat in Numberland, by Ivar Ekeland and John O'Brien
• A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L'Engle (First I heard of a tesseract.) There's an audiobook where L'Engle reads it herself. Highly recommended.

And please add your own suggestions!

PS:

• Cindy Whitehead saw that I missed the Sir Cumference books, by Cindy Neuschwander, and suggested the Go Figure books, by Johnny Ball.