The material that follows in Beyond Plain English and in the Appendix spans an unusual range of levels of mathematical sophistication, with some material properly belonging in a high-school curriculum and other (I am told) more naturally belonging to a second-year graduate course. It is perhaps inevitable that mathematically sophisticated readers will feel at times that they are slumming, or at least that they are in a very strange neighborhood. If you are among them I ask your indulgence. It would be rude and not quite true to say that this book wasn't written for you, but my primary motivation was to write it for people who don't know much mathematics. It has been suggested that it would be more seemly to exclude the elementary material, which everyone over age 15 knows anyway. I haven't done so because it's all material that I either never knew or had forgotten, as I have forgotten how to read the Aeneid in Latin. I believe I am not alone, and I don't think it realistic or kind to ask the nonmathematical reader to hunt up an old high-school text in order to read this book. One might as well say that he or she has no right to be interested in mathematics.

Some of the elementary material (a review of trigonometry, for example) is self-contained; if it offends, just avert your eyes. The pace of some more advanced articles may pose more of a problem, but I couldn't have written them any other...