Playing With Math: Crowd-Funding Campaign Enters its Second Week

The Book

Did you know that that there are over 50 people working on Playing With Math: Stories from Math Circles, Homeschoolers, and Passionate Teachers?! We are authors, puzzle & game-makers, artists, and editors. The most recent additions to the group are mathematical artists who agreed to share a piece of their work - the opening page of each section now features an amazing, thought-provoking work of art.

To see some of their work, you can visit these websites:

• The Math Circle Section piece comes from Paul Salomon (already in our group for his wonderful imbalance puzzles). Here's more: lostinrecursion.wordpress.com/art/stars-of-the-minds-sky
•  The Homeschoolers section piece comes from Erik and Martin Demaine. Here's more: erikdemaine.org/curved
• The Passionate Teacher section piece comes from Tom Banchoff and Davide Cervone. Here's more: http://www.math.brown.edu/TFBCON2003/art/welcome.html  and  http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/professional/art/welcome.html
• The Resource section piece comes from Henry Segerman. Here's more:  www.shapeways.com/shops/henryseg

Here's the last illustration that was made for our book. It was a community effort with original concept by me - inspired by Melanie Hayes' chapter (At the Eye of the Hurricane), drawing by Linda Palter, caption by a reader from this blog who I know only as Teach for Life, and lettering by Maria Droujkova. I love it, and I hope it goes viral some day...

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The book is now ready to go to page layout. What a thrill! I am so proud of all of us.

The Campaign

Sol Lederman interviewed me last week, and posted the interview as part of his Inspired by Math series. Just before he posted it, Adrian Pumphrey, of MathEd Out, offered to interview me too. That happened on Wednesday, and is now posted on his site. If you like podcasts, listen to the interviews and let me know what you think. The two conversations definitely went in different directions.

As of this writing, we have over $5000 in contributions pledged, 67% of our $7500 goal, with 177 supporters. With your help, we can keep the momentum up. Maybe we'll be lucky enough to talk about our stretch goals toward the end of the month. Getting translations out quickly would be lovely.

Are you inspired enough to head over to the campaign site right now and make a $25 contribution (or more) to reserve yourself a copy? I hope so.