“AL, Logical” book update #5
This is a joint update by Xavi Golden and Dr. John Golden, the authors of AL, Logical that is soon to be published by Natural Math, and Dr. Maria Droujkova, the founder of Natural Math. We’ll be posting periodic updates about the book on the blog and sending them by email to the supporters of the book.
Hey, everyone!
It’s been a minute since we’ve given you all an update; so, let’s remedy that.
After a busy summer of traveling, math conferences, and teaching classes, we’re knuckling down on layout, cover design, and the book’s supplemental materials. All that being said, the new estimated delivery date is September 2026. As we’re sure you’re aware, this is later than we originally planned, but we appreciate your understanding and support. If you are planning on teaching out of the book in August or September, please contact us for the current draft.
While we work on getting the book ready for printing, make sure you’ve completed the backer survey so we know where to ship your copy (or copies)!
Meanwhile, here’s a glimpse at our work on the cover. This is one of the first back-and-front cover drafts from a couple of years ago, which we call “the superhero ensemble,” and the front cover you saw during crowdfunding this spring:
That’s good, but AL is an action hero in the book, so we wanted her doing things on the cover. Math things. Maybe:
Great, mission accomplished! But now we are missing those “ready for anything” vibes from the first covers and the extradimensional robodog. Also, the ghost-mathematician was pretty special. Could we have it all? But how? Here’s the most recent cover sketch (back and front). What do you think?
In case your students want to draw their own versions of the Mathematician’s haunted house just like the book team did, John made a GeoGebra prototype (isometric) where you can turn the individual slabs around: https://www.geogebra.org/m/su6cuxzq
Author events
Grand Valley State University interviewed the authors for their alumni newsletter. Check it out!
If you’d like a live event with the authors for your class, math circle, or other community, contact us.
Posted in Make & Grow
7/25 live event with Math Kangaroo and 8/12 Math Makers @ Dix Park – July 2026 News
Thank you for checking out what’s new in the Math Maker Neighborhood! In this newsletter, you’ll see:
- Future Book Club: A live online event on July 25 hosted by Math Kangaroo USA with Kara Shane Colley, the author of My Hundred Friends
- Math Maker activity: Do you use pretend-play, stories, or improv to do math at home or with students?
- Research Triangle, NC live math: August 12 indoor math playspace at Dix Park, Raleigh
Future Book Club news
Join us for a live and interactive online event for students in grades 3-5 this Saturday, July 25, at 1 p.m. EDT. Register to receive your link. (The event won’t be recorded.)
Meet Kara Shane Colley, the author of My Hundred Friends (Natural Math), a book about a cozy world where the mathematics of factors and multiples means friendship. Do you like comics, puzzles, and mathematical art? Then bring your pencil box and your imagination, and solve Math Kangaroo problems with the book’s creative, powerful techniques honed by math and engineering pros.
Math Kangaroo USA is dedicated to helping students love mathematics. It runs an annual international mathematics competition that inspires tens of thousands of students, and celebrates everyone who comes and gives it a try. The problems focus on critical thinking, logical reasoning, and creative problem-solving skills.
Math Maker Neighborhood
There are many lists of mathematical techniques floating around, with ideas like “Make your problem smaller” or “Work on your proof backwards, starting from the end.” What if we made a list like this with techniques inspired by storytelling? Do you immerse your group in history or cultural traditions while teaching math? Do you invite your students to imagine being two-dimensional characters? Do you use math fantasy books, cartoons, pretend-play, or improv? Please drop us an anecdote about your experience! We started our growing list of techniques at an improv workshop at Math Camp for Teachers (North Carolina) and a storytelling workshop at the Math Circles Institute (Indiana) this summer.
Math Circles Institute 2026: math makers taking over the world.
Research Triangle, NC events
On August 12, 2026 from 10 a.m to noon, join us in a beautiful (and air-conditioned!) pop-up math playspace at Dix Park chapel, Raleigh for puzzles, games, and art activities for ages 5 to 125 in the Math Maker Neighborhood series. The theme for August is Dividing and Uniting.
Can you split the map, guiding visitors to the closest ice cream stand in the park? Can a song win a popularity contest if fewer than half of the listeners prefer it? Why do both spies and artists love prime numbers? Come and play with the mathematics of dividing, fairly or otherwise. Featuring a take-home math kit for ages five and up inspired by game theory, operations research, and computer science.
Yes, we will play with gerrymandering, as you might have guessed – but we’ll only vote for broccoli vs. ice cream. We’ll also bring back the crowd favorites from our past themes, such as the giant Soma cube and the fluffy cord tangle puzzles.
If you’d like to volunteer, have a question, or want to talk about children learning mathematics, contact Natural Math.
Posted in Newsletter
“My Hundred Friends” Campaign Update #4: Math propelled the story forward
This is a joint blog post by Kara Shane Colley, the author of My Hundred Friends that is soon to be published at Natural Math, and Dr. Maria Droujkova, the founder of Natural Math. We’ll be posting periodic updates about the book on the blog.
Kids are natural storytellers because they are still open to the world of possibilities and imagination. How powerful it could be to encourage students to use their imagination when doing math, or even better, when playing with math.
Maria: The book campaign hit 100% – THANK YOU! The book is a go!
Kara: I’ve been beta reading middle grade and young adult manuscripts for two of my friends since 2015. Kerry Duff has stories pouring out of her. She has written several novels and published two short stories in Cricket, the children’s literary magazine. My favorite story of hers is called Granby, which focuses on a little girl left behind after the circus leaves town.
Kristin Burchell has a deft hand for writing enchanting historical fiction. She has several published novels. My favorite is The Witches of Proposal Rock, which takes place in 1660s New England, where magic is a force “to be feared and avoided.”
Kerry and Kristin’s writing feels to me like a beautiful magic. It amazes me how their sentences flow effortlessly and the pacing holds your attention while they build up complex characters and compelling plots.
It feels easier to describe bad writing: clunky, overdone, and painful to read.
Before I wrote My Hundred Friends, I tried to write a little story inspired by the series The Adventures of the Black Hand Gang by Hans Jurgen Press. As children, my brothers and I were obsessed with this book. As you read, you follow a group of children as they solve a mystery. You solve along with them by studying “purposefully busy” pages to find the clues.
I tried to write a story that had to be solved using clues hidden in a “purposefully busy” picture, called Cousins’ Campout. The writing of it felt forced. I had to work backwards to build the mystery, pulling the details aggressively from my brain, instead of my imagination offering ideas up. It’s a cute enough story, but I just don’t have the knack for this type of writing.
My drawing for Cousins’ Campout
Over the years, I’ve heard people say, “Write what you know.” I think that is why My Hundred Friends is a good story. I know math. I know numbers.
Maria: One of my favorite loanwords is sprezzatura: the art of making something difficult look easy. Every writer has the kind of stories they know, love, and have worked out, stories they can craft with the magic feeling of flow and page-turning ease. Writing is still a complex endeavor, no matter what. Discovering what feels like your story doesn’t make writing simple, merely doable. And bearable when editing gets tough.
Kara: After my 48th birthday, the idea came to me that I am actually friends with the numbers, and I wondered if that could be the basis of a book. Immediately, I jumped to thinking about the numbers multiplicatively. I suppose that is because of the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, which says that every integer greater than 1 can be factored into a product of primes in exactly one way (aside from rearranging the factors). When I first learned about the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, the “fundamental” in its name stood out to me. That word felt like a link to mathematicians of the past, like they were telling me, “This is what’s important.” I started to make a page for each number, naming how I related to that number. For example, 7 days is one week. Since I was thinking of the numbers multiplicatively, it made sense to me to write their prime factorization in the bottom right corner.
Things just started jumping out at me. Two was excited to see 2 ✕ 2 in the bottom right corner of the 4th page, so I drew Two yelling, “Look! It’s me and me again!” Then, it was as if I could see that scene once more on Page 8 (2 ✕ 2 ✕ 2), so I drew Two yelling, “Wow, it’s me and me and me!” I realized that these patterns had to happen every time there was a perfect square or a perfect cube, on and on.
Multiplying by 11 is delightfully straightforward. I had the narrator point that out with a simple catchphrase, “It’s fun to multiply by 11,” on pages 22, 33, 44 and so on, while the characters added their own takes. Math was propelling the story forward. The number-characters’ excitement and playfulness gave them personality. I was off and writing! Unlike my attempt at a Black Hand Gang-inspired puzzle-mystery story, My Hundred Friends unfolded naturally.
Maria: Another straightforward catchphrase: “Good writing is rewriting.” An author might rewrite their sentences in their mind while taking a walk, edit on paper with their special pen, or discuss the draft with trusted friends. The techniques and rituals are many, but by the time your prose feels smooth to read, it’s been polished with deep focus. What care and love sustain that focus and propel the story depends on the author. Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic? Sure! Factoring as a relatable inspiration for art is more popular than you’d think.
Posted in Make & Grow
Factoring is friendship (check this out by 6/30); graph theory activities; Triangle, NC gatherings – June 2026 news
Thank you for checking out what’s new in the Math Maker Neighborhood! In this newsletter, you’ll see:
- Future Book Club news about three math fiction stories for elementary, middle school, and young adult readers.
- Math Maker activities: two graph theory explorations with Juneteenth themes for your family or math circle, ages 5 to adult.
- Research Triangle, NC live math: event series at Dix Park, Raleigh, a joint fundraiser with The Forge Initiative, and more.
Future Book Club news
Every Natural Math book is made together with hundreds of early readers, parents and teachers who test the materials with students, as well as backers joining the crowdfunding campaigns and spreading the word. Thank you, Future Book Club. You rock! Here is some news about our upcoming books.
My Hundred Friends by Kara Shane Colley is a highly illustrated book where numbers are people, and multiplication, division, and factors lead to friendships. (People ask this a lot, but don’t worry, the primes aren’t lonely in the story!) Children who like pretend-play, anyone who’s into cozy comics, and those who want solid pre-algebra foundations will love this fresh take on multiplicative reasoning. The book is being crowdfunded at Natural Math until the end of June. Check it out! See sample pages, meet the author, read geeky updates about writing mathematical fiction, and join the club.
Upper elementary and middle-school students who want a story that’s a step beyond multiplication will enjoy Modultown! That book about characters who live by modulo arithmetic will be going to its backers a couple of weeks from now. After that, it will be available to the general public. Check out a sample chapter and fanart from the early readers! The authors, Drs. Sasha Fradkin and Allison Bishop, and the artist, Mark Gonyea, really delivered on the bonus puzzle booklet. It came out beautiful and mathematically enticing. Here’s a little sample:
For the high school crowd, we have a young adult graphic novel coming out later this summer, AL, Logical by the son and father team of Xavi Golden and Dr. John Golden. If you like math puzzles, ghosts, and the strange, you will love this fantasy story. Xavi is wrapping up a new cover, to be revealed soon. Meanwhile, John is running the revised math notes by a few colleagues for a final round of feedback. Thank you to all who helped! Here’s a rabbit hole/bonus definitions game from the Notes. Beware, this game looks mild, but it can spark hours of math debates in your class or around the kitchen table.
The mathematician is pretty picky about language, and some would say that is not unusual for mathematicians. Is everything either dead or alive? Is the mathematician dead or alive? Is the mathematician a ghost? Are ghosts dead or alive? Mathematicians often try to resolve questions like these by coming up with a good definition. That allows us to be precise. But first we have to agree on the definition! We usually make lists of things we want to fit the category and of things that don’t fit the category. For Alive and Not Alive, where would you put: people, dogs, trees, wood, seeds, ghosts, bacteria, viruses, cells? This can get pretty difficult. What might seem counterintuitive is that we want it to be difficult! Try to break your definition with difficult examples.
Math Maker activities
Grab these ready-to-use printouts for your family mathematics, the “M” part of your STEM event, or a math circle. This June, we partnered with Triangle Math Teachers’ Circle and Dix Park to develop two graph theory activities. They are accessible for anyone who can count to 10 (ages 5 and up), and celebrate Juneteenth themes.
Research Triangle, NC math maker events, Summer-Fall 2026
Join these local events! Math Maker Neighborhood is a gathering of people and organizations. We aim to make all the subject areas of mathematics accessible to everyone. Our benchmark: 5-year-old children making their own creations using mathematical tools from these subject areas and sharing that know-how with friends. These events put joyful experiences in a bigger mathematical context. Do you have a math circle, math event, or want to add math to your community event? Let’s add your gathering to this list!
Photo: Math Makers @ Dix Park, June 2026
- June 17, July 1, and August 12, 10 a.m. to noon—Math Makers @ Dix Park, Raleigh—all ages—family math mini-festival with puzzles, games, and art activities in an indoor space, with a take-home math kit—free, optional RSVP, volunteers welcome.
- August-December, every other Saturday morning—UNC Chapel Hill Math Circle—multiple age bands—explorations and problem-solving—free, registration is required.
- September 19, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. —Bugfest, NC Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh—all ages—largest indoor and outdoor STEM festival in the region—free, come and play, volunteers welcome.
- Fall, to be announced—NC State Mini-Fest and Math Circle, Raleigh—multiple age bands—large-group interactive lecture and festival puzzles, games, and art activities at the math department—optional RSVP.
- Fall 2026, weekly—Durham Academy Math Circle—grades 3-4 students—explorations, art, and problem-solving—for students at DA (see the school catalog).
NEW: The Forge Initiative open tech space in Apex and Natural Math are collaborating to start math circles and events at The Forge. Until the end of June, we are running a joint fundraiser with the local math friends. Check it out!
If you’d like to volunteer, have a question, or want to talk about children learning mathematics, contact Natural Math.
Posted in Newsletter
