Mathematicians Are People Too! Volume 1 Copyright 1990

This book is a great way to inspire your little people to love math, and strive for higher goals like the people they will be reading about.

This books is excellent for a read-aloud to your children about ages 7 or 8 to 12. (10 and up or so could read on their own.) I read a chapter aloud each week to my children, and when I felt they'd understand a mathematical principle, I would try to explain that to them as well. No, it's not going to teach them a ton of math, but it does build excitement and interest for math and it makes math seem more personable. And I really like it that they include famous women mathematicians.

I'm a former math major, and I loved these books! I used both volumes about six years ago, when I was homeschooling our youngest son. If I were teaching math in an elementary or middle school, I would try to incorporate these two volumes of biographies into the curriculum.I especially liked that the Reimers included stories of women mathematicians. In my experience, far too many girls give up on math at an early age, and it's important for them to have role models. In fact, few kids of EITHER gender can picture themselves as mathematicians. Before the movie A Beautiful Mind, would an average child have been able to name even one famous mathematician? The chapter titles are very catchy, which is important for children, especially since many of them approach the subject with a negative attitude. Because of the confusion in the two titles, I am listing the publishing information for each volume, along with the table of contents. I wish the Reimers would do a third volume!Mathematicians Are People, Too (Volume I)By Luetta and Wilmer Reimer1990 Dale Seymour PublicationsISBN 0-86651-509-7Mathematicians Are People, Too (Volume II)By Luetta and Wilmer Reimer1995 Dale Seymour PublicationsISBN 0-86651-823-1****** VOLUME I:******Pyramids, Olives, and Donkeys. ThalesThe Teacher Who Paid His Student. Pythagoras The Man Who Concentrated Too Hard. ArchimedesA Woman of Courage. Hypatia Magician or Mathematician? John NapierSeeing Isn't Believing. Galileo Galilei Count on Pascal. Blaise PascalThe Short Giant. Isaac Newton The Blind Man Who Could See. Leonhard EulerThe Professor Who Did Not Know. Joseph Louis Lagrange Mathematics at Midnight. Sophie GermainThe Teacher Who Learned a Lesson. Carl Friedrich Gauss "Don't Let My Life Be Wasted!" Evariste GaloisLife on an Obstacle Course. Emmy Noether Numbers Were His Greatest Treasure. Srinivasa Ramanujan ******* VOLUME II:*******There's Only One Road. Euclid A Fortune Shared. Omar Khayyam Lean on the Blockhead. Leonard of Pisa (Fibonacci)The Conceited Hypochondriac. Girolamo CardanoThe Stay-in-Bed Scholar. Rene Descartes An Amateur Becomes a Prince. Pierre de FermatThe Gift of Sympathy. Maria Agnesi The Shy Sky Watcher. Benjamin Banneker The Computer's Grandfather. Charles BabbageThe Mystery of X and Y. Mary Somerville The Overlooked Genius. Neils Abel Conducting the Computer Symphony. Ada LovelaceThe Lessons on the Wall. Sonya Kovalevsky The Compass Points the Way. Albert EinsteinThe Master Problem Solver. George PolyaMarjorie Alley

We have had such a great time with this book. We have read it at night as a family then done some hands on experiments with the different storys theorys. We built our own pyramids from legos and measured them and their shadows to study about thales. We have done gravity with Galileo and Newton and learned about the stars with them as well.Great book.

It's hard to tell from the titles, but there are 2 volumes of this book; I think this is volume 1. Each volume has 15 short stories about famous mathematicians, suitable for any age from (I'm guessing) 8 to adult. I've been reading these stories for family reading, and my 11 year old son is actually excited about geometry! After reading about Pascal, we did some internet research about cycloids and hypocycloids; more commonly known as the figures that can be drawn with a Spirograph. Volume One has chapters on the following people: Thales, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Hypatia, Napier, Galileo, Pascal, Newton, Euler, Lagrange, Germain, Gauss, Galois, Noether and Ramanujan. Volume 2 covers Euclid, Khayyam, Fibonacci, Cardano, Descartes, Fermat, Agnesi, Banneker, Babbage, Somerville, Abel, Lovelace, Kovalevsky, Einstein and Polya. I highly recommend this book for increasing a child's (or an adult's) interests in the fields of math, geometry, physics and philosophy. I wish there was a Volume Three!