I can take 15 3rd-graders out on a walk and give them an interactive math lecture about symmetry, fractals, dimension, non-Euclidean geometries, and other mathe

I can take 15 3rd-graders out on a walk and give them an interactive math lecture about symmetry, fractals, dimension, non-Euclidean geometries, and other mathematical topics on any day. To do this I’d walk them past a brick wall and some buildings, we’d look at some ants and the directions they can go and we’d jump up and down to be different than the ants, we’d use the sidewalk and talk about the globe, we’d find some leaves and look at the veins in the leaves. Math is certainly everywhere, and that’s what we mean when we say it. When it comes to math that influences public policy, we're often talking about actuarial mathematics. It’s not “elite”: it's an area of complicated applications that will determine whether our economy will sink under health-care costs or not. Math for national security? Crypto, and since good implementation of the math ideas is at least as important as the ideas, I don’t think it’s as elite as he makes out. Gromov-Witten theory is built for the few. Elliptic cohomology is build for the few. Whittaker functions are built for the few, the elite, the more-likely-than-not Russian. This is what the NSF funds, among other math. But that doesn’t jibe with the intermittent discussion of policy and … economics?… attempted in the article. I don’t think this author has a point. The author doesn’t distinguish between math used in and for public policy and math funded by the taxpayer. The author is trying to argue that since people aren’t good at math it maybe doesn’t exist (?) (“If math were really everywhere, it would already belong to everyone equally.” What does this mean?) The author tries to address racial/social/class inequities in math education access but only sort of randomly, at the end, without discussing causes, effects, or mechanisms, and while ignoring the international face of mathematics and the mathematicians who exist today.