Edward MacNeal

You won't need any special knowledge of math or semantics to read this book. I promise you I've put no useless puzzles in here, nothing designed just to show what marvelous things math can do, how smart I am, or how foolish people can look who don't know the math tricks.
Puzzles and tricks tend to annoy slower but surer thinkers. I still remember my brother's resentful complaint about geometry, a subject he reached three years before me. He said he didn't like geometry; it was just a bunch of puzzles. His work that day at the blackboard had been criticized, he said, even though it contained no errors, because he'd take more steps than Euclid had.
Well, this book won't put you down for taking your own route. Quite the contrary. To ""get"" mathsemantics, I believe you need to think autonomously. The field of mathsemantics, as we'll see, covers too much of life to be reduced to a bunch of fixed rules and procedures.
Mathematics does have power, elegance, mystery, and even great beauty. But this book concerns plainer stuff, like adding apples and oranges, using numbers more tellingly, and not making damn fools of ourselves.… (mehr)