February 1, 2025
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Pieces of broken pots are scattered over the desert hillsides of the Southwest. The Indians there treat them with respect — “Every piece of clay is a piece of someone’s life,” they say. And the children try to imagine those lives that took place in the desert they think of as their own.
Pieces of broken pots are scattered over the desert hillsides of the Southwest. The Indians there treat them with respect — “Every piece of clay is a piece of someone’s life,” they say. And the children try to imagine those lives that took place in the desert they think of as their own.
Clay has its own small voice, and sings. Its song has lasted for thousands of years. And Byrd Baylor’s prose-poem as simple and powerful as the clay pots, sings too.
On a stormy night two hundred years ago, a young woman sat in a dark house and dreamed of her life as a writer. She longed to follow the path her own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had started down, but young Mary Shelley had yet to be inspired.
When I looked up, I shivered. How many stars were in the sky? A million? A billion? Maybe the number was as big as infinity. I started to feel very, very small. How could I even think about something as big as infinity?
When her parents took away her candles to keep their young daughter from studying math…nothing stopped Sophie. When a professor discovered that the homework sent to him under a male pen name came from a woman…nothing stopped Sophie. And when she tackled a math problem that male scholars said would be impossible to solve…still, nothing stopped Sophie.
Penrose, a cat with a knack for math, takes children on an adventurous tour of mathematical concepts from fractals to infinity.
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