Edward Frenkel, author of Love and Math, was on The Colbert Report.
Here’s a transcript of an especially interesting segment:

Edward Frenkel: When you say that you hate math, you’re really saying I hate the way math was taught to me. Imagine you’re in art class in which they only teach you how to paint a fence or a walk but they never show you the paintings of the great masters. Then of course years later you’re going to say “I hate Art”, what you’ll really be saying is “I hate painting the fence.” And so it is with math. When people say “I hate math”, what they’re really saying is “I hate painting the fence.”

Stephen Colbert: But in math, don’t I have to know a fair amount of the high end math to appreciate the work of the masters? It’s almost as if you can show me the painting of the masters, but I don’t have eyeballs yet. Don’t you have to grow the math eyeballs to see the equations as beautiful?

Edward Frenkel: That’s our job. …