There is a sidewalk in our town with this equation painted on it. It is actually in the form with the 1 on the other side, showing that e to the power of i times pi = -1.
When I first saw it, I couldn't believe. I have had lots of adventures with math. I have had ups and downs. In grade school, I didn't do well. I could memorize number facts, such as 7 x 9 = 63 but I couldn't drag myself through several dozen multiplications of three digit numbers times three digit numbers. I wasn't motivated.
I liked high school plane geometry and I think I did ok in it. Euclid and his gang loved logical proofs and for centuries, men thought they were reasoning as God does, at least when dealing with opposite interior angles of a line intersecting a pair of parallel lines. Then, Riemann and Lobachevsky and others showed that Euclid was only right on plane figures and that spheres and saddles are different entirely. Turns out God is a little bigger and trickier than we thought.
College was fairly math free until I found I needed a minor. Math seemed like a good bet and I took math of finance and statistics and did ok. Teaching 5th grade, I found math was the easiest, most straight-forward subject and took much less preparation and mess than social studies or science. I became interested in finding better ways of schooling and got a PhD in statistics and testing and that involved some math. Not that much and with modern computers and spreadsheets, it is very easy. Besides, it makes people think you are a brain and they don't bother you.
Many people are avid readers, sometimes of bodice rippers and Harlequin romances. I often tried to convince them to try a math book once in a while. They just laughed, even though there are a slew of wonderful books on who did what in math and why it matters. I got carried away by Men of Mathematics by E.T. Bell and Finite Mathematics by John Kemeny. (links to free pdf of the whole thing). Bell introduced me to some of the really great mathematicians, including the Swiss mathematician Euler (pronounced oiler) and he realized the equation on the t-shirt, often called Euler's identity, which is a truly amazing fact.
