Count On Me

The little girl narrator of this story belongs to a passionate family: her father’s passion is painting; her mother is an avid entomologist and her brother is a lover of music. As yet though the girl hasn’t identified a passion of her own so she sets about so doing. School presents many possibilities: there are various sports, music and dance, cooking for instance but none of these fires her enthusiasm.

Then comes a surprise revelation – during an art lesson – no it’s not painting but maths that this girl truly loves. She sees maths and mathematical possibilities everywhere in everyday life be they numerical, or related to shape, patterns, problem solving, sets or trajectory

Through a series of scenes showing such places as the park, the playground (geometric patterns), the lakeside (concentric circles), block play, the family dining table, a balcony (a paper aeroplane’s trajectory) and an art gallery, Tanco reveals how exciting to the child is this world when viewed through a mathematical lens.

Any new vocabulary is easily understood by the reader when presented in this visual manner – stone skipping across the lake results in the formation of concentric circles on the water’s surface while there’s an abundance of fractals especially in nature. This latter observation is revealed in the little girl’s personal maths journal – a kind of visual glossary – at the end of the story wherein she records her findings relating to the various mathematical concepts covered in her narration.

I was anything but a maths enthusiast as a child, but perhaps things might have been different if I’d been exposed to this exciting book at the age of its protagonist.