The Ancient Formula

Melinda Thielbar is a writer, teacher, statistician, and student of the martial arts. Manga Math Mysteries, including The Kung Fu Puzzle and The Secret Ghost is her first children’s series.

In 2005, Melinda left SAS to finish a PhD in statistics. She was awarded a VIGRE fellowship at North Carolina State University. This fellowship is awarded to students likely to make a strong contribution to education in the mathematics and statistics field. Again, Melinda earned a fantastic reputation in the classroom. Her statistics lectures and examples were known for their ability to hold her students’ interest—no easy task in a statistics for non-majors class that’s held at 8:00am.

Melinda lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband, writer Richard Dansky, and their three cats. She is currently working on the research portion of her PhD.

Having grown up in Jakarta, Indonesia, Tintin Pantoja graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2005 with a BFA in Illustration and Cartooning. She has worked on a self-published webcomic/graphic novel called Sevenplains, Hamlet: The Manga Edition, three Manga Math books so far, and what would have been a graphic novel adaptation of Pride and Prejudice for Tokyopop. Right now Tintin splits her time between Manila, Philippines, and Jakarta, Indonesia, with occasional visits to Canada and the USA. Besides working for Lerner (which she enjoys), Tintin has several fantasy graphic novels that she’s trying to get off the ground.