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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on On Juvenile Fiction - Less Wrong
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I read a couple of excerpts from Phantom Tollbooth in my Childcraft books - the part about the Mathemagician looking for the "biggest number" and so on - this would have been at around age 5 or so - and that was probably one of the first pushes in my life toward mathematics.
I think I read exactly the same excerpt -- that was my first contact with the novel. If memory serves it was in a world book children's set of encyclopedias, in the math volume. It was heady stuff for a seven-year-old, and I loved it.
I'm remembering a passage in Childcraft about eating soup made of negative numbers that made you hungrier.
That section comes from the part where Milo and his companions arrive in the Number Mines and are completely famished because they've been travelling all day. They eat and eat but never get full. Eventually, the Dodecahedron helpfully tells them that they've been eating Subtraction Stew because it's perfectly logical that you'd start off full and eat until you're hungry.
Ditto. Verbatim (except maybe around age 8 instead of 5).