Math with Bad Drawings: Illuminating the Ideas That Shape Our Reality [Paperback]

A hilarious and bestselling reintroduction to mathematics, illustrating the ideas with stories, humor, and stick figures.

In Math with Bad Drawings,Ben Orlin reveals what math is all about. His tools are unorthodox: jokes, cartoons, strange-but-true stories, and beneath it all, the empathy of a veteran teacher who believes that math should belong to everyone. Orlin helps us to think like mathematicians by teaching a brand-new game of tic-tac-toe, profiling the ten people you meet in line for the lottery, and documenting the headaches that ensue when the Evil Empire attempts to build a spherical Death Star.Math with Bad Drawingswill change the way you see the subject—and the world.

Ben Orlinis the author of Math with Bad Drawings (as well as the blog of the same name), Math Games with Bad Drawings and the companion game kitThe Ultimate Game Collection, andChange Is the Only Constant. His writing on math and education has appeared in The Atlantic,theChicago Tribune,theLos Angeles Times, Slate, Vox,andPopular Science.He has taught middle and high school mathematics and has spoken about math and education at colleges and universities across the United States. He lives with his family in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The book is a more polished, extensive discussion of the concepts that pepper Orlin's blog, featuring his trademark caustic wit, a refreshingly breezy conversational tone, and of course, lots and lots of bad drawings. It's a great, entertaining read for neophytes and math fans alike because Orlin excels at finding novel ways to connect the math to real-world problems-or in the case of the Death Star, to problems in fictional worlds. Ars Technica Ben Orlin is terribly bad at drawing. Luckily he's also fantastically clever and charming. His talents have added up to the most glorious, warm, and witty illustrated guil´