Manil Suri has an interesting Op-Ed on math–How To Fall In Love with Math–in The New York Times today. As befitting someone who is both a mathematician and a novelist, there are passages of writing in it that are both elegant and mathematically sound. The examples he provides of mathematical beauty–the natural numbers, n-sided regular polygons that become circles as n approaches infinity, fractals–are commonly used, but for all that they have not lost any of their power to beguile and fascinate.
I fear though that Suri’s message–that math is beautiful, creative, elegant, not to be confused with routine number crunching, and worthy of wonder and exaltation and careful study–will not be heard through the haze of the very math anxiety he seeks to cure. Suri needn’t feel too bad about this though; many others have tried and failed in this very endeavor in the past. If, as Suri suggests, we are wired for math, we also sometimes give the appearance of being chronically, congenitally, incurably anxious about it.
A personal note: I came to a realization of mathematics’ beauty late myself. Like many of the math-phobic that Suri refers to in his article, through my school years my attitude toward the study of math was fraught with fear and befuddlement. I was acceptably competent in the very junior grades but a harsh teacher in the seventh grade ensured that I would earn my worst grades then. My concerned father took it upon himself to drill me in algebra and I regained a little confidence. Not enough though, to want to study it at the higher levels that were made available to us in the ninth and tenth grades. But the pressure to study engineering at the university level meant I had to return to the study of more advanced mathematics for the eleventh and twelfth grades.
In those two years, I was exposed to calculus for the first time and came to love it; its connection with motion, the slopes of curves, the use of differential equations to model complex, dynamic systems; these all spoke to me of a logical system deeply implicated in the physical world around me. Once I had learned calculus, I saw it everywhere around me: in a stone’s dropping, a car’s acceleration, a rocket’s launch, an athlete’s push off the starting block.
I majored in mathematics and statistics at university, but if I saw any beauty in mathematics in those years, it came when I saw some good friends of mine working out complex problems with some style. I had lost motivation and interest and barely survived my college years. My graduate studies in computer science didn’t help; I was able to–unfortunately–skip the theory of computation and graduate.
Years later, when I encountered mathematical logic as part of my studies in philosophy, some of my appreciation for the world of abstract symbol manipulation came back. It helped that my dissertation advisor was an accomplished mathematician whose theorems and proofs sparkled with style and substance alike. From him, I regained an appreciation for the beauty of the symbolic world.
I was never a mathematician, and don’t work in logic–mathematical or philosophical–any more. But my brief forays into that world were enough to convince me of the truths that Suri refers to in his piece:
[Mathematics] is really about ideas above anything else. Ideas that inform our existence, that permeate our universe and beyond, that can surprise and enthrall.
Samir Chopra 
… revisting this post of yours as I am thinking a lot about how to communicate the beauty of theoretical physics to lay audiences.
I am – and ever was – most intrigued by the mathematical and abstract concepts in physics. Probably I have to thank my high school teachers who had a very Feynman-y teaching style. But this also meant they were able to motivate and inspire the minority of students who planned to study something science-y and lost many other students who might have preferred the number crunching / rote approach.
I am baffled by ‘math anxiety’: I didn’t know that it exists until I was told by university curriculum strategists that nothing scares (potential) students off like too much math.