Math part two

Sometime the universe lines up in crazy ways.

Just after I concocted my post about math last week, we got a package in the mail for Gabriel and family. At the time I assumed it was from my mom but it was actually from my late friend Cobra's husband, Mark. After seeing him at Cobra's memorial service, I had a few emails back and forth to him regarding Joel's birth, but then it seemed awkward to continue to have much contact with him. Even though he came to our wedding, he and Cobra had dinner with Jav and I a couple of times, and was sometimes around when I visited Cobra at their home, I didn't have all that much interaction with him and it just seemed strange to try and stay in touch with him. But we sent him a Christmas card, and I guess that motivated him to send a gift to Gabriel.

The amazing thing was that it was a book called, "You Can Count on Monsters". Each page has a number (from 1 to 100) on the left side, and a "monster" on the right that is some type of geometric shape. Every prime number gets its own monster. Non primes show the factors that make up that number and their monsters. Sometime they are distorted, or drawn in strange ways, but you can always tell which on is which. For example, the image above shows "7", one of my favorite monsters, a hexagon wearing glasses. This is the picture for fourteen, in which the hexagon is eating the "2" monster, which is made up of circles. It really is an awesome book, not just because the monster pictures keep Gabriel interested, but because it teaches math using pictures of something besides numbers. He loves the book and is now really good at counting to 100.

I sent Mark a long thank you note asking him to let me know how he's doing.