Jules Verne (1828-1905) used a combination of scientific facts and his imagination to take readers on extraordinary imaginative journeys to fantastic places. In such books as " Around the World in Eighty Days, From the Earth to the Moon, " and " Journey to the Center of the Earth, " he predicted many technological advances of the twentieth century, including the invention of the automobile, telephone, and nuclear submarines, as well as atomic power and travel to the moon by rocket.
Ian Thompson is senior lecturer in Mathematics Education at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Observations of his own young children struggling to make sense of number operations and calculations provided the stimulus for his research into children's idiosyncratic mental and written calculation strategies which he began in 1986. He has written a substantial number of articles on this topic for academic and professional journals, and recently edited the book Teaching and Learning Early Number (1997). He was a member of the Advisory Group for the National Numeracy Project and was also a member of the team responsible for the training of the project's Numeracy Consultants.
