“Math” has a bad reputation. It’s regarded as difficult, boring and irrelevant. There are moves to reduce the amount of “math” that is taught in schools, or, at least, the amount that’s required.

This is terrible.

You may have noted that I put math in quotes. You may even have wondered why. It’s because what the vast majority of kids learn in elementary school and middle school and even high school has the same relation to math that spelling has to creative writing or that playing scales has to composing music. Not completely irrelevant, but utterly stultifying.

Imagine if you had to play scales for 5 or 10 years before you were shown any music.

Imagine if you had to be able to make 100 different shades before you were allowed to paint.

Imagine if you had to be really good at spelling before you were allowed to write.

Yuck.

Well, that’s what we do with math. Because math, like music, writing and visual art, is the pursuit of beauty. But you won’t find any beauty in most math classes, and people (including, perhaps, you) will look at you funny if you propose that math is about the pursuit of beauty, because all they’ve ever been exposed to is playing scales, naming shades and memorizing spelling rules.

In addition, most educated adults have some idea what most professions are about. They may be way oversimplified, but they have some notion. But most educated adults have no idea at all what mathematicians do — which is come up with theorems and proofs of theorems.

It is true that a lot of math requires a huge amount of preparatory work. But not all math does. There’s lots of beautiful stuff that can be done even if all you know is some basic arithmetic. And tons more if you know just a little algebra. And, again, this is like writing, music and visual art. You can write some good poetry without being Shakespeare; you can play some beautiful music even if you’ll never play Schumann’s Toccata or Beethoven’s Piano Sonata 32. And you can make a nice painting without it being the Sistine Chapel.

In this series: Elementary Math: Beautiful Math (tag EMBM) I will present some beautiful math that doesn’t require much training. If you have ideas that you want me to write about, let me know. And if you want to add your own, feel free to use the tag.