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Joyce joined The Tampa Tribune as senior editor for metro in 2005 and later helped launch TBO.com’s continuous news desk. He has worked as an editor and reporter in Arizona, Kentucky, Virginia, Idaho and Stuart, Fla. Email

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Can you learn to love numbers as an adult?

Posted Feb 1, 2010 by Jeff Scullin

Updated Feb 1, 2010 at 01:06 PM

Numbers can be really, really, really confusing. In newsrooms across the country, there’s an old joke – as sad as it is true – that most people went into journalism so they wouldn’t have to do math. While it may be understandable why most journalists wouldn’t want to spend their time doing what we do here—sifting through numbers, analyzing data and quantifying elements of the news in various and sundry ways – that aversion to math can also be stifling for anyone who wants to make sense of anything above the grade of Lowest Common Denominator.

I stumbled on something this morning on The New York Times Web site that strikes me as both brilliant and a tremendous public service. Steven Strogatz, a professor of applied mathematics at Cornell University known for his efforts at explaining math to laymen, is writing about the basics of numbers – what they are, how they’re used, how we should think about them. The goal is to encourage those who’ve developed an aversion to all things math over the years to maybe give them another shot.

“I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective,” Strogatz writes in his initial blog post. “It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.”