<i>professional mathematicians, physicists and engineers need to know all this, but most citizens would be better served by studying how mortgages are priced, how computers are programmed and how the statistical results of a medical trial are to be understood.</i><p>This illustrates that authors have no idea what they are talking about. I worked at a clinical lab at one point, and it is downright <i>scary</i> that the people who interpret your medical trials do not know how to calculate a standard deviation without using a TI calculator. Basically these people were not very good at math or abstract reasoning, yet they were taught <i>the procedure</i> how to calculate some particular result after a clinical trial, so they would abide by this procedure as if it was a holy incantation, which shows that in reality had no idea what they were doing, which is completely scary.<p>You don't fix math education by teaching less math.