Intro to book

gistfile1.txt

Mathematics is driven by curiosity, and a good question is one of the most valuable
things you can have.  With this book, we hope to give you a basic familiarity with
several fields of mathematics, and inspire you to ask your own questions about them.

Let's start with an example: suppose you have a rectangle.  Can you cut it into squares
that are all the same size?

If you're used to mathematics as it is taught at school, this might not seem like much
of a mathematical question at all; we're not calculating anything, and we're not
solving any equations.  It turns out that questions like this, where we explore what
is possible, are some of the most interesting out there.

While we're showing you the various areas of mathematics that we'll use as inspiration
for our questions, we'll show you how to relate these areas to each other, and give you
the tools to do this yourself in the future.

% This is missing a closing sentence.  Something like "We don't intend to make you an
% expert in any of these fields, but we hope we'll give you both the context and the
% spark of curiosity to look further."