FOM: accessibility of mathematics

[Colin Mclarty]

Reply to message from JSHIPMAN at bloomberg.net of Tue, 11 Nov
>
>Although "ordinary" mathematics may not be able to meet the
>very high standard of general interest that f.o.m. (as
>exemplified in say, Godel's work) can [because there is more
>general interest in "reasoning" than there is in any more
>specifically mathematical topic],

	Do you have any factual basis for this? the Amazon Books 
bestseller list for 1996 has five books roughly on mathematics:

39. Aczel FERMAT'S LAST THEOREM
40. Kaku HYPERSPACE: A SCIENTIFIC  ODYSSEY THROUGH PARALLEL UNIVERSES, 
	TIME WARPS, AND THE TENTH DIMENSION

80. Hofstadter FLUID CONCEPTS: COMPUTER MODELS OF THE FUNDAMENTAL
	MECHANISMS OF THOUGHT

94. Berlinski A TOUR OF THE CALCULUS

98. Paulos A MATHEMATICIAN READS THE NEWSPAPER

	Of these, only the Hofstadter is close to foundations.

	Math is doing worse at Amazon this week. The only mathematical
work on their hot 100 for last week is no.59 Singh FERMAT'S ENIGMA 

	My local Borders bookstore carries about 500 books on math. 
Maybe 10 of these deal with foundations (and that counts my book on 
topos theory--say 9 if you don't want to count that).

	When I see math in the newspaper it is mostly Wiles and Fermat
these days (has been for several years now) and after that it is
chaos theory.

	My barber refuses to polled on the subject. 

	Are you just making this up about the general interest of
foundations? Or do you have facts to cite?

Colin McLarty