**123**ABC**

My earliest memories include hearing a distant train whistle from the back steps of the building we lived in on Chicago's near north side. I can also see myself crying under the "trapezi" (Greek for "table") when my grandmother left to go home to her apartment. I remember watching my mother rub her feet in bed at night, and I remember my father playing baseball and wearing his baseball cap indoors to cover his thinning hair. And, lest you wonder where I'm heading, I can recall watching my grandfather at the kitchen table reading The Chicago Tribune.

The train whistle and the newspaper symbolized the outside world, frighteningly, yet appealingly different from the warm family ooze in which I was happily immersed. What was my grandfather reading about? Where was the train going? Were these somehow connected?

When I was five, we moved from a boisterous city block to the sterile environs of suburban Milwaukee, 90 miles and 4 light years to the north. Better, I suppose, in some conventional 1950s sense for my siblings and me, it never felt as nurturing, comfortable, or alive. But this brief reminiscence is intended to be an introduction (or, rather, an introduction to the introduction) and not an autobiography, so let me tell you about The Milwaukee Journal's Green Sheet. This insert, literally green, was full of features that fascinated me. At the top was a saying by Phil Osopher that always contained some wonderfully puerile pun. There was also the "Ask Andy" column: science questions and brief answers. Phil and Andy became friends of mine. And then there was an advice column by a woman with the unlikely name of Ione Quinby Griggs, who gave no-nonsense Midwestern counsel. Of course, I also read the sports pages and occasionally even checked the first section to see what was happening in the larger world.

Every summer my siblings and I left Milwaukee and traveled to Denver where my grandparents had retired. On long, timeless Saturday afternoons, I'd watch Dizzy Dean narrate the baseball game of the week on television and then listen through the static on my grandmother's old radio-as-big-as-a-refrigerator as my hero Eddie Matthews hit home runs for the distant Milwaukee Braves. The next morning I'd run out to the newspaper box on the corner of Kierney and Colfax, deposit my 5 cents, and eagerly scour The Rocky Mountain News for the box scores. A few years later, I would scour the same paper for news of JFK.

Back home, my affair with the solid Milwaukee Journal deepened (local news, business pages, favorite columnists) until I left for the University of Wisconsin in Madison at which time the feisty Capitol Times began to alienate my affections. Gradually my attitude toward newspapers matured and, upon moving to Philadelphia after marriage and graduate school, my devotion devolved into a simple adult appreciation of good newspaper reporting and writing. My former fetishism is still apparent, however, in the number of papers I read and in an excessive affection for their look, feel, smell, and peculiarities. I subscribe to The Philadelphia Inquirer and to the paper of record, The New York Times, which arrives in my driveway wrapped in blue plastic. I also regularly skim The Wall Street Journal and The Philadelphia Daily News, occasionally look at USA Today (when I feel a powerful urge to see weather maps in color), The Washington Post, the suburban Ambler Gazette, the Bar Harbor Times, the local paper of any city I happen to be visiting, the tabloids, and innumerable magazines.

At fairly regular intervals and despite the odd credential of a Ph.D. in mathematics, I even cross the line myself to review a book, write an article, or fulminate in an oped. But if I concentrate on it, reading the paper can still evoke the romance of distant and uncharted places.

One result of my unnatural attachment to newspapers is this book. Structured like the morning paper, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper examines the mathematical angles of stories in the news. ........