Edward MacNeal's Mathsemantics presents a whole new way of looking at math that liberates math phobes from math anxiety, enables businesspeople to do their jobs more effectively, entertains and informs math buffs, and provides educators with the tools to teach math without instilling fear. How can it do all that? By reuniting numbers and meaning, two subjects that should never have been separated in the first place.This divorce between numbers and what they mean begins in childhood and pervades every aspect of life from then on. One result is innumeracy. Like John Allen Paulos's bestseller of that name, this book describes the symptoms of the problem, but unlike Innumeracy, Mathsemantics offers a solution: a revolutionary way of looking at math as a language, something we've all heard but which never made sense until now.Mathsemantics takes off from a quiz that was given to job applicants for the author's consulting firm who described themselves as "good at numbers." Most of them, it turned out, weren't in fact good at numbers, because they couldn't draw conclusions about what the numbers meant. The good news is that many people who think they're terrible at numbers will find after reading this book that they aren't so bad after all. They'll learn how to one-up the number crunchers.Mathsemantics is that rare book that will change the way readers look at the world. It provides the most promising and entertaining answer yet to the problem of American innumeracy. Read Less