[Comments on the following are welcome.] Here’s something you’ll never see in popular writing about musicians: Music. The mere word conjures up memories of metronomes and endless scales, the music student’s never-ending fear of playing a wrong note (or the right note at the wrong time), and the frowns of music teachers from whom a curt “Good” was the highest expression of praise. And yet there are some people who just can’t get enough of making music; they practice hour after hour, honing their skills, long after the stage of life when there are parents and teachers forcing them to do it. What strange quirk of character compels this behavior? As I said, nobody writes about musicians that way. And yet, when they’re writing about mathematicians, writers sometimes come up with passages like this: You and math – one of the greatest love/hate relationships of all time. What is it about the subject that excites us yet sends a chilling tingle down our spine at the same time? How can it be so precise, yet so fickle? We may never know the answers to these questions, but we do know that math is ubiquitous, though some of us may try to hide from it. This is from the introduction to a 2010 profile of mathematics editor Vickie Kearn <http://blog.press.princeton.edu/2010/08/31/executive-editor-vickie-kearn-and-the-science-of-loving-math/>, which I recently saw on the blog-site of Princeton University Press, where Ms. Kearn has worked as senior editor for many years. The intro continues in a similar vein. “… While math may sometimes cause us to cry tears of despair, it has caused Vickie to cry tears of joy.” This is an extreme example, I grant you (the author was an undergraduate intern). But the underlying approach is one I’ve seen other journalists use, though usually not so blatantly. I think I get what those journalists are trying to do: they’re reaching out to people who wouldn’t ordinarily read an article about math and saying “Hey, I’m not so different from you; you should really give my article a try.” But how far can one take this device before it becomes demeaning to the subject matter? A related gripe of mine is news editors who, when publishing an article about mathematics, feel they need to dispel the tension conjured up by the mere scent of math by sticking in a jokey headline like “It all adds up for math whiz” or “Math proves to be winning formula for local teen”. (If you’ve seen headlines like these, please submit them in the Comments!) Do these editors know something that I don’t about the cues that cause a reader to stop reading one article and switch to another? Is it the same thing that Stephen Hawking’s editors knew, when they told him (back when he was writing “A Brief History of Time”) that every equation causes half of the readers of a book to stop reading? I’d like to think that these editors are wrong about the world that they and I live in, but part of me is worried that they’re right — in part because I sometimes stop reading an essay or article when I hit a passage that calls for a little more thought than the part that came before. I’m guessing that some of those journalists and editors are mathphobes, while others are not themselves mathphobes but are eager to keep their stories appealing to a wide range of readers, including mathphobes. But whatever their motive may be for reminding math-anxious readers of their math anxiety, the effect is the same, and I worry that the cumulative impact of these messages normalizes or even valorizes that anxiety. Part of what’s going on is a conflation of mathematics with arithmetic, combined with a fear of numbers. Numbers frighten many people, or leave them feeling cold. But what is accomplished when so many articles about math start by reminding readers of this? Question: Is this sort of pandering to mathphobia an American phenomenon, or is it found in other countries? Somehow I don’t imagine French newspapers (for instance) adopting this sort of tactic. The intern who wrote the passage I quoted strikes me as someone who fears math too much to be a good tour-guide on a mathematical journey for non-mathematicians. Someone like me may not be the best tour-guide either, since I don’t know first-hand what it’s like to be a non-mathematician intimidated by mathematics (though I do know what it’s like to be, for instance, a non-algebraic-geometer intimidated by algebraic geometry, which is a vaguely similar situation). Probably the best tour-guides are people who have a dual perspective as insider and outsider. Who are your favorite converts-as-evangelists in the domain of mathematics? Let me know in the Comments! Jim Propp