Math Girls

Math Girls in the Classroom

Math Girls is an exhilarating journey through high school and advanced mathematics. Narrated by an unnamed male character with a passion for math, the reader is captivated by the correlation of the relationships between characters and the flow of math concepts. He is joined in his passion for math by Miruka, a fellow student who has her own style of solving mathematics, and Tetra, a younger student with a growing passion for the world of math. Miruka takes the role as a tutor and friend figure to the narrator, while our narrator takes that role to Tetra. It is not until the end of the book that these two separate relationships with the narrator come together and these three students begin to explore the world of math together. Caught between two beautiful girls, the narrator sees not only their beauty, but the beauty that encompasses mathematics. The math concepts that are discussed in this book include: sequences, patterns, generating functions, geometric means, harmonic numbers, Taylor series, the Basel problem, partitions, and much more.
While most books that involve math are dry and hard to follow, Math Girls is not a typical math text. It does not pick a topic and spit some old proof out for you to follow, instead it shows high school students working through proofs and coming to realizations on their own. For someone who may not know the math covered in a concept, this book does a great job at explaining difficult concepts at a basic level. While the story itself would progress very slowly without the mathematics, it is the shared passion that brings these friends together and keeps the story flowing. Miruka, the narrator, and Tetra are given challenging problems by a teacher, Mr. Muraki. The students then try to solve, or in some cases understand the relation of the problem given to them. Mr. Muraki typically gives them each a different problem that turns out to be related to the problems of the others. So once they teamed up together, as one made and shared the progress of their own problem, it helped the group as a whole. This type of team work is important in mathematics because it not only broadens their knowledge but it also solidifies concepts that they have to explain to one another.
As a future educator looking to bring this book into my high school mathematics classroom, I feel that the story flows well and is well written. My only concern is that it would not keep the focus of my students. Reading through difficult math concepts is a bore for those who are not interested in math and quite frankly without the math, there is not much of a story line. The author provides a note to readers that, “If you find yourself faced with math you don’t understand, feel free to skip over it and continue with the story.” If I am using a book to supplement my teaching, I would like my students to actually read it and not just glaze over the only reason that they are reading the story; which is the math. That being said, I would not use this book to supplement my teaching in the classroom but I would have Math Girls available for students to read at their leisure.