In my years of gainful employment, I liked to call myself a handyman, because that sounded better than my trade, which is a branch of mathematics. For some reason, mathematics is not a discipline easily accepted in our society. Calling myself a handyman did not dissemble the truth, as I dealt with a wide range of problems, from science and engineering to project administration, decision analysis, and computer graphics. But people are insistent, and want to know more. Uttering the word "mathematics" elicits interesting reactions.

At Silicon Valley parties, I always seem to bump into some guy, who after inquiring about my education, says "Mathematics? Ha-Ha! I never could balance my checkbook! Ha-ha!" Because I’m polite, I’d just answer that, indeed, addition and subtraction require a special intellect.

A few of those who cannot balance checkbooks feel pity for my predicament. After having spent so many years on abstruse studies, I do not drive a Bentley, not even a Jaguar or a Range Rover, and my ranch house is not a 16,000 sq.-ft. manor with neo-medieval turrets. I must be a sucker. If I were not a sucker, I just would have gotten a BA in something useful like Accounting or Business, started a company—say a service of income tax return preparation—and I would now drive a Bentley out of my 3,000 sq.-ft. garage. As I appreciate refined logic, I think that these blokes who cannot balance their checkbooks—Ha-Ha!—may have a point. They own successful businesses and drive Ferraris.

In other people, mathematics just inspires a mix of wonder and fright. I can read that on their faces. Although I look like a regular guy, might I be some freak with a mutated brain able to perform long divisions in a split second? And am I not afraid that computers, which do long divisions faster and faster, could drive me out of business?

Young electrical engineers recently out of college, who hold high-paying Silicon Valley jobs in chip design or such, are the worst. They remember the hated calculus homework of their student days and still smart from it. Not having used any calculus in their few years of employment, they consider mathematics a useless academic perversion. They think of mathematicians as a bunch of deviants who get their kicks out of playing with abstract stuff that they invent for no good reason, and needlessly worry about existence and uniqueness. As everyone knows, engineers do not have the time to worry about such futilities because they are too busy building practical things that one can see, touch, and are used in toasters. In their eyes, mathematicians are parasites who feed off the fat created by useful, hard-working young engineers who design chips.

Hollywood obviously believes that mathematicians do not make good movie heroes. Current movie heroes are lawyers, physicians, shrinks, cops, and misfits. It appears that these occupations possess an aura of glamour that mathematics can never hope to gain. They also have a direct connection with reality. In everyday life, most people deal with lawyers, physicians, shrinks, cops, and misfits. They do because of the complexities of modern existence, like divorce, food supplements, cell telephones, teenage children, plastic surgery, and SUVs that blow their tires. Who ever goes to see a mathematician for an annual checkup? Or for settling a case of child custody? That is why so much of the world is screwed up—just kidding.

Well, I spoke a little too fast, as a new movie about a mathematician is on the list of contenders for an Oscar. Its subject is John Forbes Nash, a brilliant mind whose theory of non-cooperative games earned the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics. He had missed the Fields Medal of Mathematics by a hair in 1958 for his works in analysis and geometry at MIT and Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies. Normally, he could have hoped to earn this highest award in 1962, being considered at that time "the most promising mathematician in the world," if insanity had not gotten the better of him. For more than a quarter century, John Forbes Nash lived with paranoid schizophrenia. Some experts call his apparent return to rationality in the 1980s nothing short of miraculous.

This dreadfully sad story is indeed the stuff of a motion picture, and I understand that the director did a commendable job. He even hired a mathematician with a hand similar to Russell Crowe’s for plausible close-up shots on the blackboard. Yet, the movie is more about a brilliant mathematician afflicted with a terrible mental illness than about a brilliant mathematician, and unfortunately perpetuates the myth of the inseparability of genius and insanity. Hollywood is interested in insanity, and not in mathematicians.

Let’s face it, mathematics is not a popular discipline. It’s not understood at all. Very few high-school counselors know something about it, and too many unfit math teachers reduce the subject to the sort of uninspired, mechanical, unmotivated drudgery that makes the average student nauseate. As to the few kids who excel, they are suspected to be endowed with some rare genetic gift bordering on the freakish—the inseparability of genius and insanity. So, who wants to have anything to do with mathematics? On national tests, California secondary schools rank near the bottom for mathematics.

The damage, unfortunately, does not stop there. Aversion to mathematics breeds aversion to science. I knew many a teenager who owned a telescope and said he would become an astronomer. But when he went to college, he realized that there is not much astronomy that reduces to gazing at the sky. Modern astronomy is astrophysics, and astrophysics, like any hard science, demands oodles of advanced mathematics. So, the would-be astronomer, who cleverly coasted through high school without significant exposure to mathematics, picked a college major like Communications. This is why we are importing so many scientists from the Far East. They are not geniuses, just the average workaday scientists that we are incapable of growing at home. And whether this state of affairs is a national security risk is an open question.

The effects of this general lack of scientific education on the economic vitality of the country are difficult to measure, but, in all probability, they are considerable. Scientific education develops the sort of clear thinking necessary for cogent decisions on political and economic questions of national importance. It develops judgment. The most effective weapon used by lunatic environmentalists and their political allies is the citizenry’s ignorance and gullibility in matters of science.

Mathematicians are not freaks, nor parasites. They are regular blokes who may be a tad smarter than average because they spent a great deal of time dealing with ideas, ideas that have little to do with arithmetic feats, and much to do with a vision of progress and discovery. Mathematics is elegance, beauty, and creativity, a discipline for artists, not suckers.