Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

I may have mentioned earlier that I’m reading Everything and More, David Foster Wallace’s history of infinity. As with everything that DFW writes, it’s awesome. The problem is, the man is a super genius about everything, including math. And I’m a non-math-doing guy. So the book started off pretty good, with a lot of intellectual history and basic mathematics, it very quickly spiraled into a discussion of calculus and linear algebra and all sorts of advanced concepts that I have no idea how to even begin to describe. Which stinks, because I’d really like to finish the book.

This is all to say that I’m thrilled that the New York Times’s Opinionator blog has decided to commission Steven Strogatz, a professor of applied math at Cornell, to do a series of weekly blogs about the principles of math. Says Strogatz:

I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.

Is anyone else tremendously excited about this sort of thing? Maybe it won’t put me on the path to finishing the history of infinity, but math is very important! And, if mathematicians are to be believed, fun! Eh? Anybody?