I wasn't stating that as the assumption - I was stating that they wouldn't be interested in reading a/book/ about it enough for it to be "classic," no matter how well it was written.
"Moby Dick" is a classic. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (sp?) is a classic.
The *lay person* won't find a *math book* worthy of being a "classic" anything. It will be, at best, something they read when they're feeling like dorks.
That being said, don't project your own interests onto the masses. The lay person simply
The lay person has only as much use for high level theoretical mathematics as high level theoretical mathematics is able to accurately model reality. In other words, not very much.
Can you show me something that CAN be accurately modeled- to any degree of precision- with mathematics? I can't think of one. Estimated, sure. Close enough to achieve some great things, sure. But to any degree of precision? Not even close. And to most of the nuanced, grey scale problems in the average layman's life, hardly at all. Most lay people never need calculus- compound interest is the most complex calculus problem they ever use, and it's equally solvable by iteration. Your average person never has to deal with infinities on either side of the scale- infinitely small or infinitely large. Prime numbers are largely just a neat mental challenge- there's nothing in real life that you can model with primes. Heck, even integers are largely useless- nothing ever has a property that is exactly an integer unless it is in cyberspace. So, what form of higher mathematics do you think you know that can model the universe accurately enough for COMMON usage?
The key word here is "ANY" degree of precision- close enough to achieve some great things is NOT equal to any degree of precision. Achieving great things is also not equal to achieving common things that can be achieved in other ways. Mathematics is not the end-all way to model the universe, yet. It's close. It's as close as the number of bytes of precision you want to do it in. But it will NEVER model the universe completely- and it's unreasonable to expect lay people to be interested in a method that
Part of learning mathematics is learning to communicate your thoughts in an unambiguous manner. This is an important and useful lesson even for lay persons such as yourself.
The ambiguousness is on purpose- the world is not unambiguous and neither is humanity- thus learning to communicate your thoughts in an unambiguous manner is neither important nor usefull in all situations, and can sometimes be uttlerly non-usefull.
A mathematician is like a guy with a hammer to whom every problem looks like a nail- so
How do people tell which problems are mathematical and which problems are non-mathematical?
An easy way is to take a concept from mathematics itself. The definition of a function. For any n-dimentional function, there should be n-1 solutions for any given input. Non-mathematical problems have MULTIPLE right answers- they are ambiguous not only in the original question, but also in the solution.
Why is that you want to take hammers out of the hands of lay people?
That's reading an intent into my words
An inclined plane is a slope up. -- Willard Espy, "An Almanac of Words at Play"
lay person? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ummm...what would its peers be? Just how many "classic" math books does the lay-person have now?
Could it be that the lay-person wouldn't be interested in any book about math, no matter how well written?
I dunnnoooo...almost sounds completely probable.
Re:lay person? (Score:5, Insightful)
Martin Gardner's series of Mathematical Games books certainly qualifies as classic.
I would put some of Douglas Hofstadter's books in there too. Certainly _Godel, Escher, Bach_ is highly (though not entirely) mathematical.
Richard Smullyan also has a number of very good math/puzzle books.
There are others, too, but you get the idea. I don't think you need to be professional mathematician to enjoy any of these.
Re:lay person? (Score:1)
"Moby Dick" is a classic. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (sp?) is a classic.
The *lay person* won't find a *math book* worthy of being a "classic" anything. It will be, at best, something they read when they're feeling like dorks.
That being said, don't project your own interests onto the masses. The lay person simply
Re:lay person? (Score:2)
Re:lay person? (Score:0)
Re:lay person? (Score:2)
Can you show me something that CAN be accurately modeled- to any degree of precision- with mathematics? I can't think of one. Estimated, sure. Close enough to achieve some great things, sure. But to any degree of precision? Not even close. And to most of the nuanced, grey scale problems in the average layman's life, hardly at all. Most lay people never need calculus- compound interest is the most complex calculus problem they ever use, and it's equally solvable by iteration. Your average person never has to deal with infinities on either side of the scale- infinitely small or infinitely large. Prime numbers are largely just a neat mental challenge- there's nothing in real life that you can model with primes. Heck, even integers are largely useless- nothing ever has a property that is exactly an integer unless it is in cyberspace. So, what form of higher mathematics do you think you know that can model the universe accurately enough for COMMON usage?
Re:lay person? (Score:2)
Re:lay person? (Score:2)
The ambiguousness is on purpose- the world is not unambiguous and neither is humanity- thus learning to communicate your thoughts in an unambiguous manner is neither important nor usefull in all situations, and can sometimes be uttlerly non-usefull.
A mathematician is like a guy with a hammer to whom every problem looks like a nail- so
Re:lay person? (Score:2)
An easy way is to take a concept from mathematics itself. The definition of a function. For any n-dimentional function, there should be n-1 solutions for any given input. Non-mathematical problems have MULTIPLE right answers- they are ambiguous not only in the original question, but also in the solution.
Why is that you want to take hammers out of the hands of lay people?
That's reading an intent into my words