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Comment by digital55 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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From the brief description, this sounds to be quite basic. Looking forward to hearing if Terence has treated the explanations differently. :-)

> 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.

Basic … that kind of word give me nightmare in my mind when you talked about maths … still remember a book called “elementary set theory” …

I remember a joke along the lines of "elementary" meaning that someone somewhere has solved it before.

"Any question in maths is either unsolved or obvious."

My favorite example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Number_Theory

"The word `basic’ in the title is closer in meaning to `foundational’ rather than `elementary’ [...]" (quoted from that same wikipedia page).

"The title is the same as that of a very well-known book by Professor L. E. Dickson (with which ours has little in common). We proposed at one time to change it to 'An introduction to arithmetic', a more novel and in some ways a more appropriate title; but it was pointed out that this might lead to misunderstandings about the content of the book."

            G.H. Hardy and E. M. Wright "An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers"

The one math majors joke about is Serra’s A Course in Arithmetic, which is definitely not for young children.

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