Mathematicians Are People, Too: Stories from the Lives of Great Mathematicians, Vol. 1

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 Reimer
1990 Dale Seymour Publications
ISBN 0-86651-509-7

Mathematicians Are People, Too (Volume II)
By Luetta and Wilmer Reimer
1995 Dale Seymour Publications
ISBN 0-86651-823-1

****** VOLUME I:******
Pyramids, Olives, and Donkeys. Thales
The Teacher Who Paid His Student. Pythagoras
The Man Who Concentrated Too Hard. Archimedes
A Woman of Courage. Hypatia
Magician or Mathematician? John Napier

Seeing Isn't Believing. Galileo Galilei
Count on Pascal. Blaise Pascal
The Short Giant. Isaac Newton
The Blind Man Who Could See. Leonhard Euler
The Professor Who Did Not Know. Joseph Louis Lagrange
Mathematics at Midnight. Sophie Germain
The Teacher Who Learned a Lesson. Carl Friedrich Gauss
"Don't Let My Life Be Wasted!" Evariste Galois
Life 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 Cardano
The Stay-in-Bed Scholar. Rene Descartes
An Amateur Becomes a Prince. Pierre de Fermat
The Gift of Sympathy. Maria Agnesi
The Shy Sky Watcher. Benjamin Banneker
The Computer's Grandfather. Charles Babbage
The Mystery of X and Y. Mary Somerville
The Overlooked Genius. Neils Abel
Conducting the Computer Symphony. Ada Lovelace

The Lessons on the Wall. Sonya Kovalevsky
The Compass Points the Way. Albert Einstein
The Master Problem Solver. George Polya

Marjorie Alley


WONDERFUL DUET OF BOOKS   March 2, 2000
Naomi Williams (Santa Rosa, CA United States)
49 out of 49 found this review helpful

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!


Great for a read-aloud   December 21, 2004
M. Christensen (Orem, UT United States)
10 out of 11 found this review helpful

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.


Teach your children to love Math the fun way   March 4, 2002
Wendy E. Roberts (Tooele, UT United States)
11 out of 13 found this review helpful

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.


Bought for School   September 3, 2008
Donald C. Boyd Jr. (Ashland, Ky USA)
I bought this book for my wifes math class for college. She needed to write a research paper on one of the people in this book. She said it was a great resource for her research paper.