From Mindspillage

The most valuable children's book I ever read was Sideways Arithmetic From Wayside School, by Louis Sachar.

Much of my pleasure reading is nonfiction, and much of that on communities and microeconmics: groups, cooperation, rational and irrational behavior, why people do what they do. Various concepts pop up repeatedly: critical mass for stable, self-sustaining groups, choices dependent on what other people will do, logical dilemmas... I think I quite literally took every course in the undergrad catalog that involved the explicit study of logic. But it occurred to me, upon reading a college-level text, that my first introduction to most of these concepts was Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School. It's a children's book, aimed at elementary schoolers, in the same setting as the Sideways Stories from Wayside School.

And it's actually pretty sophisticated math. About half the book is "alphametics": arithmetic problems written out so that each number is replaced by a specific letter, usually in such a way so that the inputs and outputs spell words (for example, "elf+elf=fool"); the challenge is to determine which numbers the letters must represent. (For example, the "f" must be 1 here.)

The other half is logic problems and puzzles, and not easy ones; at least, ones that even a mathematically-inclined adult would have to take a little time to solve, and a non-mathematically-inclined adult would have to take time to figure out how to solve. I read it when I was 9 or 10 and found it a great challenge. It probably did more to open up the idea of logical problem-solving outside of math textbooks, and the ability to figure out how to approach those problems, than any other book I read. And the word problems were funny. Every bright kid should get a copy. Because by the time I saw those concepts again (I wish I had gotten a really good math education in grade school, but that's another story), they had been a part of my thinking for such a long time that they weren't foreign when I saw them.

Also, despite it being a classroom copy, I got as much time to work through the problems as I wanted, because I finished my "real" classwork in no time, and no one else in my class was interested in reading the book.

Originally from the old blog.