“This brief and elegant celebration of mathematics is a charming rant against the way you and I learned the subject.  Is painting just coloring in numbered regions?  Is the sunset just a list of wavelengths and a compass setting?  No more, Lockhart argues, than mathematics is just definitions and formulas.  To put back play and joy in our mathematics classrooms, he shows, all we need do is restore the real mathematics.”

Robert P. Crease, author of The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg