Sure, I'm pretty sure I learned the terms in middle school too. But along with matrix inverses, it's not the kind of thing that people retain, especially since

Sure, I'm pretty sure I learned the terms in middle school too. But along with matrix inverses, it's not the kind of thing that people retain, especially since it was detached from any real framework with which to orient it; many students tend to learn it by rote as a descriptor detached from any usefulness or meaning. Eg, you don't need to do any reasoning about the concept of commutativity to know that subtraction isn't commutative; much younger children are capable of subtraction without grasping commutativity as an abstract concept. Associativity as an out-of-place concept is similarly useless for lower-level math when you can just use the much more concrete PEMDAS. Function composition is a pretty trivial concept, but I referred specifically to using ∘ to represent it; this symbol isn't IME as widely-understood to the layman as simply using f(g(x)) (by contrast with college-level and higher math, where it's very widely in use). The gist of my point was that even the smartest quantitatively-inclined people who went to my private school in a tony part of California aren't likely to have retained familiarity with these concepts unless their college education and/or career involves theoretical math. This is leaving aside people not as smart, or less quantitatively-inclined; my friends who fall into this bucket probably didn't remember what commutativity and associativity were by the time they _entered_ college, let alone later in life. Arguably this latter group wouldn't be part of the target audience interested in reading an article about theoretical math at all, but my friends in the former group certainly would read publications like Nautilus on general mathematical topics.