Play Book Tag discussion

I loved this book, but it won’t be for everyone. I needed to read it slowly, a few pages a day, and I sometimes skipped sections. It’s the experience of a man who, having flailed his way about as far as algebra II, decides at sixty-three years of age to go back and study mathematics with the goal of understanding calculus. He doesn’t achieve his goal, but his insights along the way, along with a few nuggets of history, fascinated me. Because I studied applied mathematics, I missed out on the wonders and magic of theoretical (“pure”) math. Now that learning math doesn’t seem like an existential threat to me (I’m no longer being graded!), I could relax and enjoy the wonder. A reading friend who is a physicist and a down-to-earth applied mathematician didn’t like the book. He wanted some diagrams and found the author too long winded. I admit that there were the sections I skimmed, and also I also tired of the author’s whining about having felt duped as a boy in math class, but the little nuggets of wonder meant so much to me. Maybe any book describing pure mathematics for a non mathematician would have done the same, but this is the one that opened the world to me, so I had fun with it.