Americans' mathematical illiteracy and its consequences for our culture.

In the late 1980's, John Allen Paulos, a mathematician at Temple University, wrote the best-selling book "Innumeracy," which examined mathematical illiteracy and found it to be rampant.

The ramifications of mathematical illiteracy are very real.

Such mathematical illiteracy and Mr. Fernandez's years as a mathematics teacher, colleagues said, made him single out the subject.

If one is hampered by mathematical illiteracy, law does provide something of an alternative, I suppose," he conceded loftily.

People have always accepted bogus claims, agrees John Allen Paulos, a mathematician and the author of "Innumeracy" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), which examines the link between mathematical illiteracy and the susceptibility to pseudoscience.

Solving the problem of mathematical illiteracy will require very different methods from trying to single out and encourage future mathematicians.

In his new book, the mathematician John Allen Paulos continues his witty crusade against mathematical illiteracy, as well as what he sees as such related products of scientific ignorance as our susceptibility to fraud, sloppy thinking and excessive credulity.

One symptom of mathematical illiteracy is a tendency to believe in what Jung called synchronicity.

In a century noted for scientific discoveries and mathematical applications, America takes very good care of its scientific elite while it condemns the majority of its citizens to mathematical and scientific illiteracy.