By Deborah Heiligman
A picture-book life of Paul Erdős, the boy who couldn't tie his own shoes or sit through a school day and grew up to be one of the most productive and best-loved mathematicians who ever lived.
Paul Erdős was born in Budapest, and there was almost nothing he was supposed to do that he could actually do. He hated school, so his mother let him stay home. He couldn't butter his own bread, and grown women cut up his meat for him well past the age when boys usually manage a fork. What he could do was numbers. At four he'd ask the year you were born and then tell you how many seconds you had been alive. When he grew up he never bought a house and never took a regular job. For about fifty years he traveled the world instead, showing up on one mathematician's doorstep after another, announcing that his brain was open, staying a couple of weeks, writing a paper with them, and moving on to the next. He ended up writing more papers with more people than any mathematician in history. LeUyen Pham tucked real mathematics into every illustration, prime numbers on the buildings, a Sierpinski triangle woven into a rug, and she lists at the back where each one is hiding.
If you've got a child who is brilliant at one thing and a mess at everything else, here is a whole book that says a person really can be built that way and still have a good life. Nobody in it ever tries to make Paul normal, and he never becomes normal. It also shows something a worksheet can't: Paul did his best thinking out loud, in someone else's kitchen, so math comes across as something friends do together rather than a quiet test you pass alone. And because Pham hid numbers and shapes in every picture, the book turns into a hunt on the second read, which is how you get a second and third read out of it.