I have mixed feelings about adding more communication to math textbooks or trying to make the content more accessible. I have been trying to teach myself mathem

I have mixed feelings about adding more communication to math textbooks or trying to make the content more accessible. I have been trying to teach myself mathematics over the last couple of years. Here are my findings - a) Math books offered in Borders/Barnes and Nobles invariably have titles like 'Math for dummies', 'Math made easy', "even you can do math' etc. The content seems excessively shallow and diluted by huge amounts of infographics. b) I believe the key to writing a good math textbooks is having a good feel for 'pregnant pauses'. Good textbooks have problems and prose that deliberately make the user confront their doubts and then shove them into the pregnant pause, out of which the reader emerges joyful at seeing the entire picture. I believe that writing with such mastery requires experience and skill that is not common. c) I believe that in specialised subjects you are better off writing for the benefit of the motivated reader because everyone else will rarely be applying the contents of the textbook in real life. d) By overly simplifying things you rob readers of one of the true joys of mathematics - figuring out a problem that they consider difficult. Unless the reader is addicted to this joy they will find most meaningful real world problems too perplexing to solve. In short I wish we had more concise and thought provoking textbooks. Here is what Feynman had to say about textbooks: http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm