Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice: How to Discover a Shape

The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice: How to Discover a Shape

Alznauer, Amy
Bron, Anna

Hardcover

BiographyMath & Computers

Publisher Price: $18.99

ISBN10: 1536229474
ISBN13: 9781536229479
Publisher: Candlewick Press (MA)
Published: Mar 4 2025
Pages: 48
Weight: 1.15
Height: 0.70 Width: 9.70 Depth: 10.70
Language: English
Writing with a storyteller's flair, Alznauer captures her audience's attention with colorful phrases and interesting facts. --Booklist (starred review)

Ablaze with pattern and color, this ebullient picture book biography celebrates the intersection of art and science--through the life and lens of an extraordinary amateur mathematician.

When Marjorie Rice was a little girl in Roseburg, Oregon, in the 1930s, she saw patterns everywhere. Swimming in the river, her body was a shape in the water, the water a shape in the hills, the hills a shape in the sky. Some shapes, fitted into a rectangle or floor tilings, were so beautiful they made her long to be an artist. Marjorie dreamed of studying art and geometry, perhaps even solving the age-old problem of five (why pentagons don't fit together the way shapes with three, four, or six sides do). But when college wasn't possible, she pondered and explored all through secretarial school, marriage, and parenting five children, until one day, while reading her son's copy of Scientific American, she learned that a subscriber had discovered a pentagon never seen before. If a reader could do it, couldn't she? Marjorie studied all the known pentagons, drew a little five-sided house, and kept pondering. She'd done it! And she'd go on to discover more pentagonal tilings and whole new classes of tessellations. In this visually wondrous tribute, Anna Bron's intricate art teems with patterns, including nods to M. C. Escher, and radiates the thrill of one woman's discovery, playfully inviting readers to approach geometry through art--and art through geometry. Back matter offers more on the story of five and suggestions on how to discover a shape.

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