Q&A with Amy Alznauer

 

 

 

Amy Alznauer is the author of the new children's picture book biography The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice: How to Discover a Shape. Her other books include The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity. She teaches mathematics at Northwestern University, and she lives in Chicago. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write a children’s picture book biography of mathematician Marjorie Rice (1923-2017)?

A: I have a long-standing interest in amateur mathematicians, actually amateurs of every stripe. In the amateur – a word that literally means someone who loves – we see what must be inside everyone who achieves something great, especially in a creative field (and yes, I’m including mathematics as a creative field).

 

I’ve written four picture book biographies and for me every single story is a history of a love – how a particular, abiding, even obsessive love grew from childhood into the eventual discovery or creation of great things. In that sense, children are the original amateurs, pursuing their passions purely out of love rather than gain.

Marjorie Rice is the quintessential amateur, someone whose childhood love of nature and patterns continued on throughout her life, even in the midst of raising five children, and eventually found expression in her quest to solve a famous old and visually beautiful geometric problem. Ever since I first came across her story, I’d thought about writing about her.

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

A: I put together a huge binder – an idea I got from John McPhee who always binds his copious research into a single tome – which contained everything: all of the articles by Rice herself or by others about her work, the Martin Gardner Scientific American articles that show up in my book, unpublished letters Marjorie wrote, all of my work – diagrams, notes, doodles – trying to understand the mathematics behind her discoveries, and interviews with two of Marjorie Rice’s children.

The most overwhelming aspect of creating this story was precisely that Marjorie Rice was an amateur. In other words, her name alone – like  the name Einstein or Martin Luther King – wouldn’t carry the day.

 

To make the reader understand why Marjorie’s story was incredible, I also had to tell the story of the problem she solved. Two stories – one human and one mathematical – at once! I spent an entire summer stumped, until I finally realized I literally had to do exactly that: tell two stories side by side.

Q: What do you think Anna Bron’s illustrations add to the book?

A: They do so much, but what comes to mind first is her illustration allowed this tricky, side-by-side story structure to achieve clarity on the page. With different color palettes and even styles, Anna was able to guide the reader beautifully through what could have been quite confusing.

 

Furthermore, I think there are very few illustrators who would have been confident enough to tackle the geometry of the text. She not only took it on but went way beyond the geometric figures I gave her – designing her own borders and repeating patterns – and bringing flat diagrams to life with whimsical detail.

 

And finally, The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice is about the love of art and geometry and nature, actually the intersection of all three. Anna Bron brought that to life with the absolute exuberance of her painting – the cover being a beautiful example.

Q: The Kirkus Review of the book says, “Alznauer’s cogent, absorbing text captures Marjorie’s excitement and offers easily understood explanations of the math involved.” What do you think of that description?

A: It is always thrilling when Kirkus Review loves your book. But I think they hit on two of the things that were closest to my heart as I worked on this story.

First, Marjorie’s excitement is precisely that spirit of the amateur I hoped to convey. Great work percolates in hidden places long before we see its expression in the world.

 

For Flannery O’Connor (the subject of my book The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor), those hidden places were her backyard where she raised strange birds and her desk where she obsessively drew and wrote.

 

For Srinivasa Ramanujan (the subject of my book The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity), his hidden places were his slate, his notebook, the flat stones of his temple’s floor, anywhere he could privately work on mathematics with chalk or pen.

 

For Marjorie Rice, it was nature walks as a child, magazines at lunchtime as a teenager, and eventually pieces of paper and even the tile wall of her kitchen where she could work out her geometric imaginings.

And second, making technical ideas clear and even beautiful is one of my great joys in life.

 

I teach mathematics at Northwestern University, and every time I lecture or tutor my students, I delight in trying to take something complex, rigorous, and even abstract and make it come alive. Even when I teach, I try to use metaphor and what I call mathematical synonyms and multiple approaches to bring the essential ideas into clarity.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I have a novel coming out from Neal Porter Books, edited by Taylor Norman, in October 2026. So I am currently in the process of reading through typeset versions, talking about cover illustration and font, all those final bits that take a book from a text document into something you can hold in your hands.

But I am also under contract for a second middle-grade novel with Taylor and Neal Porter Books, so I’m working hard on that!

Writing novels has always been my heart’s desire, which I guess brings us full circle. My love as a little girl was reading, but even more than just reading, I wanted to write those stories I read. I wanted to be inside the stories.

 

I have a box of diaries from childhood filled with declarations that someday I would be a writer. And when I said that, I meant a novelist. It is that little girl, that amateur, inside of me that is cheering that I am finally fulfilling that lifelong quest.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Amy Alznauer.