The book that resulted, this book, is a sort of mathematician's take on C.P. Snow's two cultures, the literary and the scientific, and is my attempt to bridge, or at least illuminate, the gap between them. The stress is on examples, vignettes, parables, stories, puzzles, and a few memoiristic segments. Paulos' goal is nothing less than lofty. Both delightful and wise, this little book cries out to be kept close at hand, to be looked into from time to time, to be treasured as an old friend. Relevant psychological and philosophical matters are discussed and provide a matrix for both the technical development and for the jokes.
Many scholars nowadays write seriously about the ludicrous.
Some merely manage to be dull. Spanish and French translations, 1987. Dutch translation, 1990. Paulos is brilliant at capturing difficult ideas in a memorable joke. How Every Brain Is Hardwired for Math.