I write children’s books that reflect interests I have had since childhood — especially my love of numbers and nature — and I try to do it in whimsical ways that make the ideas exciting and fun. Because many people seem to think my books are exciting and fun, and because I love to meet my readers, I spend a good deal of my time at elementary and middle schools, all over the United States and abroad. I also speak at many conferences for educators. I cannot think of a better career than writing and speaking to children and their teachers.

Before I began writing children’s books and speaking full-time, I had about as many jobs as there are grains of sand on an average beach. OK, not quite that many, but close. I worked as an elementary school teacher, a journalist, a writing instructor and a Residential College Dean at Yale University. I have also put in time as a lumberjack, a veterinary assistant, a carpenter’s assistant, and a highway department worker who painted the lines down the middle of the road. (If you saw some wavy yellow lines a few years ago now you know who made them!) Oh, one more: in my 20s, I could not decide what kind of career I wanted so I became a career counselor to help other people decide!

In the early ‘80s, with my friend Neal Weiner, I drove the interstate highways of America to chow down at roadside restaurants that Neal and I reviewed in a series of guidebooks called The Interstate Gourmet. The most remarkable thing was that I didn’t gain any weight. Well, not much. In 1985, I had an idea for a children’s book about big numbers. It’s not surprising that I would have chosen such a topic for my first children’s book.

Growing up in New York City and Long Island in the 1950s and ‘60s, I was always fascinated by both the biggest and the smallest things in the universe. I took mental journeys into space, inspired by my imagination and the heavenly wonders I saw through telescopes and read about at the public library. When I peered into a microscope, I was transported to the amazing worlds of hidden life. It always amazed me that I was both a giant (compared to ants, microbes, molecules and atoms) and a dwarf (compared to elephants, whales, the Earth, the stars)— all at the same time! I wondered what was at the end of the universe. Was there such a thing as an end to the universe? If not, why not? If so, where was it?

In 1964, at the New York World’s Fair, I watched a display showing the population of the United States. Every seven seconds, the population increased by one person. I timed it with my watch, and I saw that it was always exactly seven seconds — no more, no less. “How could that be?” I wondered. “Why do those babies come popping out at perfect seven second intervals?” (After thinking about it for a while, I began to understand the concept of average. On average, the population goes up by one person every seven seconds. Sometimes it’s six seconds and sometimes it’s eight seconds, but they average out to seven seconds!)

As a youngster, I read many books, and one of my favorites was Cheaper by the Dozen, the story of a very large family. In the book, the father brings home a large piece of paper with 1,000 vertical lines and 1,000 horizontal lines, and he tells his children that the lines cross to create 1,000,000 tiny squares. This was their chance to see what exactly 1,000,000 of something looked like. I loved the idea of a number as big as one million being captured in this way, for all to see and understand. A million seemed unfathomable, but a grid that’s 1,000 X 1,000 I could understand! I thought about ways that I, too, might be able to “capture” the number 1,000,000.

I also took real journeys on my bicycle almost every day. To occupy my mind during long bike rides, I liked to calculate how long it would take to ride a magical bicycle all the way around the Earth. . . or Jupiter. . . or to the Moon. . . the Sun. . . or a distant star. Could anybody count the trillions of stars, I wondered, and if so, how long would it take? I wanted to understand gigantic numbers like million, billion and trillion. I knew how to write the numbers, but I wanted to have a feeling for what their size really meant. I found it challenging but fun to find ways to comprehend truly huge distances, like the distance light travels in a year, which scientists call a “light year.”

I once estimated how many books were in my town’s public library, and then I told myself, “With so many books, surely I could write just one!” But I never tried to write a book until many years later, after I had graduated from Cornell University where I majored in biology, and after I had taught at an elementary school for a few years. One night I peered upward at a clear sky studded with stars, and all the wonder and excitement I had experienced as a child came back to me.

That night I decided to write a book that would boggle children’s minds the way my mind had been boggled when I had contemplated the heavens and the large numbers used to describe them. The result was my first book, How Much Is A Million? I had to write it twelve times before I felt it was good enough to submit to publishers, and the first 17 publishers told me to forget it. The 18th publisher said, “We love it!”

How Much Is A Million? came out in 1985. I was very lucky that my book was illustrated by Steven Kellogg. Many people – children and adults alike – seemed to love our book. My second book was about money. It’s called If You Made A Million, and it is also illustrated by Steven Kellogg. I wrote it because a lot of kids wrote me letters after reading my first book, and many of the letters said, “What I really want to know is: how much is a million dollars?”

I have also written a book based on the true story of a 66-year old Swedish grandfather who rode his bike in a 1,000-mile race, even though the judges had told him he was too old to enter. When I heard about Gustaf Hakansson, I found his story inspiring and heart-warming, and I told it in my book Supergrandpa, illustrated with beautiful water color paintings by Bert Dodson.

In the summer of 1990, I traveled in South America with Victor Englebert, a world-renowned photographer whose pictures have been published in many magazines, including National Geographic. Victor had already spent three months living with the Yanomami people of the Amazon, whose fascinating lives are respectful of their rain forest environment. Victor and I decided to write about these people. Our book is Yanomami: People of the Amazon. It describes their life style and how it is threatened by the modern world. The book also contains a section called “What You Can Do,” in which I describe some ways you can help the Yanomami people survive. (By the way, some books call these people the “Yanomamo” and a few call them the “Yanomama.” These are different spellings for the same group of people.)

I have always been fascinated by animals and plants as much as I am fascinated by numbers. In 1989, I wrote a series of nature books called The Hidden Life series. These were illustrated with photographs from one of the world’s great nature photographers, Dwight Kuhn. More recently, Dwight and I collaborated on a series of science books for beginning readers. The series is called Look Once, Look Again. (We call it LOLA for short!) The LOLA books use Dwight’s wonderful close-up photographs in an unusual way. Each book is set up like a guessing game. First you see a close-up of just a small part of an animal or plant (the brilliant feather of a peacock, for example, or the warty skin of a toad, or a cluster of seeds inside an apple). My text gives hints about the subject’s true identity. To find out for sure, you must turn the page, where you see a picture of the whole animal or plant, and more text that tells you something about it. The first 12 Look Once, Look Again books came out in May, 1997, and they were so popular that Dwight and I brought out 12 more LOLA books a year later. The following year, we produced a series called Life Cycles which explores the life histories of 12 different kinds of animals and plants, from beans and sunflowers to monarch butterflies and horses. We are now working together on a book about camouflage. I am writing the text as a series of poems. This is a totally new challenge for me.

I have two other new books that I must tell you about. One is called G is for Googol: A Math Alphabet Book, and the other is a companion called Q is for Quark: A Science Alphabet Book. I got the idea from all the upper elementary and middle school teachers who told me that their students could use some help with under-standing math and science vocabulary. First I wrote an alphabet book of my favorite math words, designed for kids in the 8-13 age range -- older than my other books. Most people think that reading about math vocabulary is as exciting as eating tofu, but I did everything I could to make my math vocabulary book fun to read, and even funny. The pictures are by Marissa Moss, the author and illustrator of Amelia’s Notebooks and all the other great Amelia books. In case you’re wondering about the word “googol,” you might be interested in this: it was named by a 9-year old boy. A googol is a huge number – a one followed by 100 zeros. You can write it like that, but there’s a much easier way to write it. (You’ll find out how when you read the book.) No doubt a googol is a big number, but how big? Is it more than the number of grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth? Is it more than the number of grass blades on all the fields and lawns on Earth? Is it more than the numbers of hairs on all the people and animals on Earth? Yes, yes and yes. A googol is so big that there isn’t a googol of anything, anywhere. Do you believe it? It’s true.

G is for Googol won several awards and I followed it with Q is for Quark, my book of science words. It starts with “A is for Atom” and ends with “Z is for Zzzzzzzz” (about sleep). In between, there’s a whole wide world of science words and ideas, like “B is for Black Hole,” and “R is for Rot,” and “W is for Wow!” – and a visual joke under “C is for Clone.” Quark is illustrated by Kim Doner, whose pictures are so funny that I keep reading the book over and over – not to reread my words, but to appreciate Kim’s fabulous sense of humor.

One of my newest books combines my love of numbers with my love of animals. It’s called If You Hopped Like a Frog. I got the idea when I was speaking to a group of teachers at a workshop, showing them pictures of animals and talking about ways that they could use math to help teach science, and science to help teach math. One of my examples became the title of the book. Here’s what I mean: a 3-inch frog can hop 5 feet. That means the frog is hopping 20 times its own length (because 3 inches times 20 makes 60 inches, which is 5 feet). If you could hop like a frog, you could go 20 times your own length (your height). You’d be quite a jumper! How far you could go would depend on your size. If you were 4'6" tall, you could jump 90 feet. That means you could make it from home plate to first base in one mighty leap! If You Hopped Like a Frog opens with that example and goes on to other examples of what would happen if humans had the amazing abilities of animals. At the back of the book, I explain the mathematics of each of these examples. They all use an important mathematical concept called “proportion.”

Ever since my first book came out, I have been spending a lot of time speaking at schools (and at conferences or workshops for educators). The very first time I went to a school, I was a little nervous. Wouldn’t you be? I had no idea of what I would tell the students. I hit upon an idea for a way to demonstrate how numbers work, and to show how big the big numbers really are. Everyone loved it. (You may be wondering what I did, but I’m not going to reveal it here, because that would ruin the surprise if I ever go to speak at your school.) I had so much fun, and so did the kids (and teachers), that I’ve taken my presentations to hundreds of schools all over United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, and even to some other countries, including Japan, Venezuela, Nigeria, Italy and France.

When I speak at schools, I have found that the students really do get excited about math and science— just as I want them to — but they also have a lot of questions that have nothing to do with math or science or books. They want to know about me. So now I’ll tell you a little about myself, aside from my books:

I live in the hills above Oakland, California. From my house, I have a view of woods with deer, raccoons, opossums, and lots of birds and butterflies. I can’t quite see the city of San Francisco or San Francisco Bay from my house, but if I walk out to a the street in front of my house, I get a great view.

I live with my wife, Yael Schy, and our two cats, Sushi and Sashimi. They are gray and white short-haired cats from the same litter. Sushi is male and Sashimi is female, and we got them when they were kittens. They like to walk on my computer keyboard, and sometimes they finish the stories I have begun writing. Recently I was working on a fictional story about animals in Africa, when I left my computer to get some tea. When I returned, I found that one of the cats had been helping me. See if you can figure out which part I wrote and which part the cats contributed:

        . . . One morning deep in Africa, a red-bellied goli-goli bird awoke with a         tremendous         eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee 8888888888fjkl;eipa jk;ldaf         ewi3=1300000999999999999999999999999[[[[[[[[[//uip

When I’m not writing books or visiting schools, I might be working in the garden or cooking in the kitchen. I love to cook — especially if I grew the food myself! Or I may be out hiking or bird-watching or riding one of my bicycles. I have a few bikes. One of them is a folding bike that I sometimes take with me when I travel to schools. One of my favorite ways to spend a few days or a week is to pack my car with a bicycle, a pair of binoculars and my hiking boots and head for the Sierra Nevada mountains. I spend my time hiking and biking, pausing now and then near a gurgling stream or in a protected nook on a mountaintop where I can read or do some writing on a pad of paper. At night I’m likely to be gazing up at the stars. They still fill me with awe, just as they did when I was a child.

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