Mathematics is abstract and difficult; its beauties would seem to be inaccessible to most of us. As the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger has observed, mathematics is “a blind spot in our culture—alien territory, in which only the elite, the initiated few have managed to entrench themselves.” People who are otherwise cultivated will proudly confess their philistinism when it comes to mathematics. The problem is that they have never been introduced to its masterpieces. The mathematics taught in school, and even in college (through, say, introductory calculus), is mostly hundreds or thousands
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