Comment by digital55
18 hours ago
Terence Tao: Just a brief announcement that I have been working with Quanta Books to publish a short book in popular mathematics entitled “Six Math Essentials“, which will cover six of the fundamental concepts in mathematics.
From the brief description, this sounds to be quite basic. Looking forward to hearing if Terence has treated the explanations differently. :-)
Basic … that kind of word give me nightmare in my mind when you talked about maths … still remember a book called “elementary set theory” …
My favorite example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Number_Theory
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The one math majors joke about is Serra’s A Course in Arithmetic, which is definitely not for young children.
I remember a joke along the lines of "elementary" meaning that someone somewhere has solved it before.
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> this sounds to be quite basic.
It should be according to Tao's own comment at the bottom of the blog:
"This book is for a general audience, without necessarily having a college-level math education. It is aimed more at adults than at children, but some children with an interest in mathematics may be able to get something of it."
I just really liked that question and response.