Did you fumble with fractions? Cry over calculus? Mathematician Steve Strogatz says there's still hope for you to love his field.

Math is everywhere," says Steve Strogatz. "It's an intoxicating way to look at the world. It's always close to the surface for me, as if I'm wearing different glasses and can see colors that other people can't. Mathematics permeates the whole world—including personal life, my wardrobe, everything."

His wardrobe?

The professor of applied mathematics isn't being glib. Some colleagues, he explains, once calculated that there are exactly eighty-five ways to tie a man's tie. "It turns out you could ask the question, ‘What are all the possible, sensible ways of tying a tie?' and people have answered it; some are new ways that weren't known until mathematicians looked at this," he says. "The point is that these people have the same bug that I have. It's not that it's useful to know that there are eighty-five ways; it's the pleasure of being creative, letting your mind ask a new question. But a spooky aspect of math is that invariably, it is useful. You start out asking this frivolous question about a tie, and the things you learn are relevant to medicine—because DNA is a double helix, so it's got a lot of geometry. This theme plays itself out over and over—that these curiosity questions that mathematicians have are mirrored in the structure of the world inside us and around us."

In the spring of 2010, Strogatz had the chance to share his lifelong love of math with an audience far beyond campus, when the New York Times ran his weekly online column on the subject's myriad pleasures. Dubbed "Steven Strogatz on the Elements of Math," the fifteen-part series took readers from the kindergarten level (a "Sesame Street" clip in which Ernie, faced with a cadre of hungry penguins each clamoring for a fish, extols the value of counting) to advanced concepts like probability theory and differential geometry. "What I want above all is for people to share the joy of the subject," Strogatz says. "People who love math love it for a reason—it gives them a lot of pleasure. It's truly beautiful."

Professor Steve Strogatz

In early October, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish the columns, along with fifteen new ones, as The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity. The thirty essays contemplate topics familiar to students worldwide: algebra, complex numbers, word problems, geometric proofs, integral and differential calculus, prime numbers, and more. "This is not remedial; it's not a course," Strogatz says. "It's not going to teach you math. It's why math is enthralling."

The essays explore complex concepts using cultural references both high and low. There's talk of Pythagoras, Einstein, and Archimedes—but also musings on the topology of a bagel, and the tale of a Verizon customer service rep who couldn't grasp the difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents. Strogatz even compares his field to Tony Soprano. "Math swaggers with an intimidating air of certainty," he writes. "Like a Mafia capo, it comes across as decisive, unyielding, and strong. It'll make you an argument you can't refuse. But in private, math is occasionally insecure. It has doubts. It questions itself and isn't always sure it's right. Especially where infinity is concerned. Infinity can keep math up at night, worrying, fidgeting, feeling existential dread. For there have been times in the history of math when unleashing infinity wrought such mayhem, there were fears it might blow up the whole enterprise. And that would be bad for business."

Strogatz's Times series proved wildly popular. Each column made it to the list of the top-ten most e-mailed articles (some at number one) and garnered hundreds of comments. "Normally, the academic experience is that you write a paper and nobody reacts—it goes into the vacuum, or more like a black hole," he says. "Except for the peer review, it's a big thud. But here, people were writing to me, asking questions. Some were parents asking about things they could do to help their kids, or just curious grownups who always wanted to understand math better."

As the weeks went by, he says, the column turned into a bit of a sociology experiment, as tussles emerged in the comments section between self-proclaimed experts and the interested laypeople for whom the column was intended. "Math people, especially schoolteachers, started weighing in, saying stuff like, ‘Let me tell you a little more about what Dr. Strogatz means...' and they would write long expositions," he recalls. "But other people said, ‘This is our column; this is not for people who are already math aficionados. Stop criticizing; you're showing off; leave us alone.'" Strogatz's wife, who took on the task of surveying the comments to spare his sanity, termed the former group "the pontificators."

The column, Strogatz notes, clearly struck a nerve. It revealed that there's a vast array of people who once loved math, but stumbled and never recovered. Years or decades after high school, it still eats at them—and they were enormously grateful that Strogatz was giving them another chance to appreciate the subject. "When people at a party hear that you teach math, it gets an emotional response," he says. "It's always regret—‘I liked math, until. . . .' For some, division was the problem, or algebra, or geometry. Some say, ‘I was great until calculus.' There's also a feeling of shame. Sometimes they blame the teacher, but there is often a sense of failure—that because it's sequential, you're done and there's no second chance. Often, for very smart people, this is the only time they've felt that they couldn't do something in school. So it becomes personal."

The Joy of X is Strogatz's third general-audience book; he previously published Sync: How Order Emerges from the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life and The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned About Life While Corresponding About Math. This fall, he'll write more online essays for the Times, this time an eight-week series using multimedia to explore mathematical concepts. "My neighbor down the street told me, ‘Your columns make me want to like math,'" Strogatz muses. "I thought that was a beautiful formulation, because she still doesn't like it—but now she wants to like it, which is the first step."

— Beth Saulnier