By Luetta Reimer, Wilbert Reimer
Fifteen short lives of the people who made the mathematics, written to be read aloud, and several of them end badly.
The Reimers took fifteen mathematicians and wrote each one as a story with a scene in it rather than a summary with dates. Thales measures a pyramid by its shadow. Archimedes runs out of the bath. Pascal is a boy inventing geometry on the floor because his father has forbidden him the subject. Sophie Germain writes under a man's name because in 1800 that is the only way anyone will read her. Gauss, aged about nine, is told to add the numbers to a hundred to keep him quiet and does it in seconds. Emmy Noether keeps teaching after she is turned out. Ramanujan works alone in India with almost no books and posts his results to a stranger in Cambridge. Each is eight or nine pages, told from the inside, and they stand entirely alone.
It answers the question that sits under a lot of children's boredom, which is who decided all this and why. The Reimers wrote these to be read aloud in a class, so they are the right length, they have a scene at the center, and they end. The effect on a child is specific: mathematics stops being a set of rules that fell out of the sky and becomes a thing that people made, often against opposition, often while broke or ignored or told to go away. Sophie Germain and Emmy Noether and Ramanujan are the ones that tend to stick, because they are all about somebody doing the work when nobody wants them to. It also pairs with anything, since a single story is ten minutes and needs no setup.