How to Free Your Inner Mathematician Notes on Mathematics and Life

How to Free Your Inner Mathematician: Notes on Mathematics and Life offers readers guidance in managing the fear, freedom, frustration, and joy that often accompany calls to think mathematically. With practical insight and years of award-winning mathematics teaching experience, D'Agostino offers more than 300 hand-drawn sketches alongside accessible descriptions of fractals, symmetry, fuzzy logic, knot theory, Penrose patterns, infinity, the Twin Prime Conjecture, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, Fermat's Last Theorem, and other intriguing mathematical topics.

Readers are encouraged to embrace change, proceed at their own pace, mix up their routines, resist comparison, have faith, fail more often, look for beauty, exercise their imaginations, and define success for themselves.

Mathematics students and enthusiasts will learn advice for fostering courage on their journey regardless of age or mathematical background. How to Free Your Inner Mathematician delivers not only engaging mathematical content but provides reassurance that mathematical success has more to do with curiosity and drive than innate aptitude.

Susan D'Agostino, Council for the Advancement of Science Writing; Taylor/Blakeslee Fellow, Johns Hopkins University

Susan D'Agostino is a mathematician and writer whose essays have been published in Scientific American, Financial Times, Undark, Ms. magazine, Times Higher Education, Chronicle of Higher Education, Math Horizons, Mathematics Teacher, and other venues. She earned her PhD in Mathematics from Dartmouth College, Master of Arts in Teaching Mathematics from Smith College, and BA in Anthropology from Bard College. She is a Council for the Advancement of Science Writing Taylor/Blakeslee Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and has served as Editor-in-Chief of A Celebration of the EDGE Program's Impact on the Mathematics Community and Beyond