The Number Devil

What Hacker News says

1. jacobolusMay 2024
   I recommend you find a copy of Lenchner's book Creative Problem Solving in School Mathematics (2nd ed.). Lenchner ran math olympiads for late elementary school / middle school for decades, and does a good job of covering a wide variety of useful strategies for approaching nontrivial word problems (i.e. real math problems, not just arithmetic drills). But you don't have to be interested in contests per se to get a lot from the book. In my opinion that's going to be more pedagogically valuable and more fun than Trachtenberg. Here's an Internet Archive scan https://archive.org/details/creativeproblems0000lenc

   Your kid would also probably really enjoy The Number Devil, a breezy novel about a kid who gets trapped in his dreams with a devil who won't stop telling him about elementary number theory, using various dream-world props.

   If you want more problems after that, there are a lot of great puzzles in Kordemsky's The Moscow Puzzles https://archive.org/details/moscowpuzzles3590000kord_m9a0, or you could take a look at Fomin, Genkin, & Itenberg's Mathematical Circles: Russian Experience which your kid could probably just about handle.

   There are also some great puzzles and games explained at the website of the Julia Robinson Math Festival, https://jrmf.org which can be played with fairly basic easily available materials.

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2. TwisolJan 2023
   As a child, I re-read The Number Devil constantly. It introduced me to some really cool mathematical ideas, couched in a cute story. The very last chapter includes a picture of the Principia Mathematica's proof of 1 + 1 = 2 -- mostly for shock value, I think, but also "even this is within your reach". I recently got to see a friend's copy of the Principia, and I realized just how much of it I actually did understand, which was a really nice closing of the loop.

   As an adult, Imre Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations gave me a much richer understanding of definitions in mathematics -- what job they're meant to do, and when it makes sense to change your definitions instead of adding premises to your theorems.

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3. mikubJan 2022
   I have the same problem as you, I just don't know the fundamentals at math. So I decided to start from the beginning with basic arithmetic. You probably should ignore book recomendations like Spivak for now. The books that I use right now are "Arithmetic for the practical man" by "J. E. Thompson" and "The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure" by "Hans Magnus Enzensberger" which is a childbook.
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4. DoreenMicheleNov 2019
   Books:

   The Number Devil

   Alice in Quantumland

   If you can tolerate a little off color humor, any of the "Cartoon guides..." By Larry Gonick are excellent for a variety of subjects.

   (If you can find old Star Wars themed software by Lucas Learning that still works, they did terrific things. Iirc, Droidworks basically taught set theory, though by example. It provided no explanation and I had to provide the explanation of set theory to my sons. But I assume it's all out of print now.)

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5. BeldinOct 2019
   I would recommend "The Number Devil" [1] for children (from 11 on) and adults alike.

   It's a zany story, but in that respect it provides a refreshing intro into some math concepts.

   In that vein, I also recommend "mathematical mindsets" [2]. A colleague developed a course inspired by this book. Though I only witnessed a tidbit, it radiated with the "new perspective/ new insights / gained understanding" that you'd get from the Feynman lectures.

   Sidenote: neither is "now you know how all of maths work", but neither is Feynman thaf (foot physics). More importantly, all of them help you gain a new perspective on things.

   [1] eg. https://www.bol.com/nl/p/the-number-devil-a-mathematical-adv...

   [2] eg. https://books.google.nl/books/about/Mathematical_Mindsets.ht...

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6. DoreenMicheleAug 2019
   This really depends on a lot of factors. You might get a lot out if illustrated works, such the Cartoon Guides ... series. You might benefit from kid-friendly, fun books, like The Number Devil or Alice in Quantum Land. Or you might benefit enormously from looking for "chapter books" on the subjects -- books filled with paragraphs of actual English instead of endless formulas. This might include something like A Tour Of The Calculus or various things about math history or biographies of mathy people.

   It depends on why you seem to be "missing" something and your post doesn't actually give any insight into what seems to be missing for you.

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