I've seen a lot of videos of people trying to teach math ideas to non-math people, and many of these presentations fall completely flat for the non-mathematicians. For example, at some point, I'd like to be able to explain "fat-tailed" v. "thin-tailed" distributions to non-mathematicians, and this is not going to be easy. In particular, I'd like to show how the tail of exp(-x^2) is a lot thinner than exp(-x), which is a lot thinner than 1/x. Nassim Taleb ("The Black Swan") has probably tried the hardest to explain these ideas, coming up with the idealized countries of "Mediocristan" and "Extremistan" where thin-tailed and fat-tailed distributions (respectively) reign. But I still think that many (most?) non-mathematicians still get lost after hearing Taleb. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan_%28Taleb_book%29 http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/03/taleb_on_the_fi.html --- Someone who used to work at NSF once told me a (probably apocryphal) story about testifying to Congress, where he said that some indicator number had to reach 10^20 for a project to be successful, but that the current best indicator that the project had demonstrated to date was 10^10. One of the Congressmen then said -- without a trace of irony -- "then we're halfway there". --- Has anyone here had any (successful) experience in explaining sophisticated mathematical concepts of this nature to non-mathematicians?