From the article: "No wonder people easily dislike mathematics, who would want to add so many numbers?"<p>But that's not mathematics, that's arithmetic. This may seem like arid pedantry, except that many people are exposed to this kind of bonehead arithmetic in elementary school and think that's all there is to mathematics. That's a shame, and a correctable error.<p>Mathematics isn't "2 plus 2 equals 4". Mathematics is Avatar:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRdxXPV9GNQ" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRdxXPV9GNQ</a><p>Mathematics is hitting a target on Mars, within a new meters, after eight months of travel:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcGMDXy-Y1I" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcGMDXy-Y1I</a><p>Mathematics is beauty:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set</a><p>I wish people could be taught mathematics <i>before</i> arithmetic, not after. But this contradicts centuries of scholastic tradition.
To quote you back "But that's not mathematics, that's arithmetic".<p>I can see your point of view, but arithmetic is one of oldest fundamentals of mathematics. This is the way I was thought.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic</a><p>Its like the old saying "Its not what you say, but how you say it". In this day and age, people generally get the perception that mathematics is all about counting.