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Here is a cool website. http://www.ams.org/new-in-math/mathdigest/

When you get there, you'll see lists of articles from the general media that
are about math. If you click on one, you'll get a very brief synopsis - maybe
2 or 3 sentence description of the article. Most are pretty much English as
opposed to Math-ese. Then, if you want to read the actual article, you can
click on that and it takes you to it. I just had a look at one that started,
interestingly, with the following first paragraph:

"Ian Stewart was turned on to mathematics at the age of seven. A broken
collarbone freed him from an uninspiring teacher allowing his mother to
ignite his interest in numbers while he was laid up at home. "

The above is from the article about Magical Numbers in Nature.

Anyway - not all articles are really lay-person accessible (hey - maybe you
don't realize this, but not all math articles are intelligible to all
mathematicians -- I can read lots of statistics-related articles, but not
advanced articles in any other field of mathematics, for example, and, to be
honest, there are MANY statistics-related articles that are off in such
specialized areas that I can't make sense of them) but anyway - these are
articles that were written, usually, for the regular person, not for
mathematicians and they can be kind of inspiring and informative in giving
you a feeling for what math is REALLY all about.

--pam



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