I've just finished reading The Art of Mathematics by Jerry P. King. The flyleaf copyright is 1992, so this is a book I could have read in college. In fact it references a number of writers and even particular works I did read in college. Yet it is now that I've read it, a year after I bought it new, remaindered or resold unread. All I know of the author is from his words and the spaces between them. Towards the end he places himself in time as starting as an associate professor in the early 1960s.

I'd like you to read the book. This exists only to say why I want you to read the book, what I saw in the book. Likely, it will say more about me than of _The Art of Mathematics_. I'd like you to read the book even, especially, if you never go into the math section of a bookstore or library. I was rather drawn both by the title and the cover art from Vermeer's The Geographer, and yet I know that might select against people reading it.

The premise of the book is rather simple. Mathematics has been badly sold. Now, that's not unusual, and in fact is what most books say of any subject that is 'taught'. Yet math doesn't recover, unlike history which is the most popular non-fiction and the least favorite school subject. Once turned away from math, people don't come back. Even those that do learn math as a tool see it only as that.

The title doesn't use art as a synonym with craft, but directs to the book's theme. Mathematics is done as an aesthetic satisfaction, that just happens to often then work as an "idea key" on real phenomena. This reason has been 'hidden', first because mathematicians aren't teachers and teachers aren't mathematicians, and secondly because utility is the 'sell'.

The reasons for the second is outside the scope of the book. Of the first he points that teachers learn math like the rest of us, and never 'caught'. Otherwise, they'd have become mathematicians. And mathematicians culturally expect and enforce that they do mathematics, not teach.

Now, he postulates that there are two camps (taken from C. P. Snow), which he defines as those with mathematical skills and those without. A small rim of those with the skills are the mathematicians, pursuing beauty. On both sides of that rim there is a misunderstanding of mathematics, either from too much distance or too little. Much of the book builds to this and I won't recapitulate it.

There is one fault with the book, which is that it doesn't distinguish from the original utility argument that was the math 'sell' and the final point he makes in the book. It is however implied. He points out that the amount of math, mostly arithmetic, needed in the 'real world' is quite small. He is less emphatic, but certainly implies, that the utility of mathematics in physics and engineering is rather cart before the horse. To stretch the analogy, mathematicians will run ahead and others will find useful ideas.

He ends with the difficulty that the division started by the poor instruction of math causes. Non-math people can't talk science, because math is the language of science. For the lack of beauty, the truth goes mute. Humanists without mathematics are bereft the language to address the most current issues of thought. For those that don't accept this as the heart of liberal education, fitting people to live thoughtfully, it may seem a jump from aesthetics which is the main line, to this conclusion.

I admit that I'm product enough of the late 20th century not to assume the aesthetic and to have only with time shed 'pure utility' as a procrustean bed. And yet I'm also enough of a Jeffersonian to think there is an import to civic life outside of counting beans and dying with the most toys. A thought stunningly more and more rare. The conclusion satisfies.