Delightful! By the way, Erdos is pronounced "AIR-dish". ( )

This book is about Paul Erdos life and what it looked like as a mathematician and how his passion for math led to a fun adventurous life. ( )

There once was a boy named Paul who loved math. He spend days calculating, counting and thinking about numbers. His mom was a math teacher and he was placed in the care of a babysitter who had many rules. He taught himself to count really high to figure out how many days it would be until summer vacation. ( )

Math genius Paul Erdos was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1913. He left for the United States in 1938 to escape the Nazis; most of his relatives, who were Jewish, were murdered by them. He lived until 1996, dying at a math meeting in Poland, but, as the author writes in her note, he is still inspiring mathematicians to this day.

The story in the book focuses on Paul’s love of numbers, on his eccentricities, and on the many people who loved him, calling him “Uncle Paul” and assigning an “Erdos number” to their friendship with him. I.e., if you did math with him, you got an Erdos number of 1, if you worked with someone who worked with him, your number was 2, and so on.

Readers of the book, recommended for ages 3 and up, will be charmed by the text, the illustrations, and perhaps become fascinated by the interesting facts about math included, especially about prime numbers.

Illustrator Leuyen Pham writes in a note in the back matter that she had “a great amount of fun trying to incorporate the world of math with the world of art in this book.” She includes a very detailed and helpful guide to the math she used in some of the images. ( )

This book was a great find for my classroom, its not often you can find a biography that children enjoy reading. The pictures make it so much easier to keep students engaged. I love that this books talks about how Paul Erdos was a genius at math but couldnt do other simple tasks, i think this will help students to understand that just because others dont enjoy math doesnt mean you have to too! ( )