One of the things he said during our interview – that in order to survive in concentration camps (from ages 13-18), he had to learn to turn his feelings off, and when the war was over, he never knew how to turn them back on again – stayed with me long after the interview it was just such a profound statement on loss. Later, as a writer for People magazine, one of my favorite interviews was with a Holocaust survivor named Henri Landwirth, who was just an extraordinary man. Like many people, I was very moved as a young teen by Anne Frank’s diary it was the book that showed me that words could change the world. (You can find a simple explanation of the Fibonacci sequence here: It had to be something simple enough for two amateurs in a church library to come up with, but something complicated enough that it would be difficult for someone to break if that person was not a professional codebreaker. Thirty years later, after months of researching WW2 codes and trying to figure out what might work for THE BOOK OF LOST NAMES, it hit me in a flash: I could actually make all those hours of math gymnastics count! And the code at the heart of THE BOOK OF LOST NAMES, which is based on the Fibonacci sequence was born. I had a book that featured math problems that had never been solved (designed, obviously, for kids like me!), and I would spend hours and hours poring over the numbers, my heart soaring with the dream of mathematic stardom (and this was long before Good Will Hunting!).Īt night, I would run the Fibonacci sequence in my head as a mental exercise before I fell asleep. When I was in third grade, I was obsessed for a few months with the weird (obviously impossible) goal of being the first kid ever to solve the world’s unsolvable math problems.

KH: Well, now I’ll have to reveal myself as a nerd….

The book of names by kristin harmel