Fan mail
One of the joys of being an author is that you sometimes get fan mail. (The other joy is that you sometimes get hate mail, which can be even more fun, like the one recently that accused me of wanting to limit science to the priesthood of scientists and not let the general public in on it. This is an odd accusation to make against someone who writes books about science intended to be read by pretty much anyone, and it's especially funny because he made this judgement after reading and liking The Elements, but not liking what he read in the Amazon reviews of Mad Science. So rather than trust his judgement that I was a good guy based on having actually read one of my books, he's decided that I'm scum of the earth based on what someone else said about a book he hasn't read.)
But anyway, back to the subject of delightful fan mail. My book has been translated into about 23 languages (most recently Slovak and Slovene), but it's very rare for me to get email from speakers of any languages other than English, Japanese, and Chinese. So it was very nice to get this item from Hungary, complete with a picture of the poster from the Hungarian translation of The Elements. It shows how you can lay out the cards from my Periodic Table Card Deck into a complete periodic table (small child for scale).
Dear Theodore,
I'm writing this email to you because my daughter and I have recently become interested in the "Elements", and I wanted to share with you these two images about my daughter's work.
We already read your nice book about the elements (in Hungarian), and now we are playing intensively with the element cards.
(By the way, I'm a great Mathematica fan since 1991; in fact, my whole career as a mathematician is based exclusively on this piece of software.)
Greetings from Hungary,
and best regards,
Lajos