Museum of Mathematics New York City

There are those who identify as math people and those who do not. But Glen Whitney, a math person, believes that the distinction is a fallacy. He studied math at Harvard, went on to U.C.L.A. for a doctorate in mathematical logic, and, a few weeks ago, he opened the doors to the Museum of Math, or MoMath, across from Madison Square Park, on 26th Street—the only place in the world that has an L.E.D. foot-touch “Math Square” as a permanent exhibit. We were standing beside it, watching a young boy run in circles around it, while Whitney dismissed the idea that studying algebra is any different from learning to drive. It’s not as though some people just shrug and say, “I’m not a car person, ” and then they have to take the bus. Whitney went on, “Our society portrays mathematics as this forbidden territory, where only initiates can go.”

For me, math was kept behind the locked door to my older brother’s bedroom, where he did his advanced-calculus homework. I understood very little of what transpired on the other side—he and his friends tossing around their T.I.-83s and telling logarithm jokes, perhaps—but from the strange smell I could imagine only that math was a potion with consciousness-expanding powers. Whitney, in glasses and a buttoned-up shirt, opened his palms to the “Wall of Fire”—a plane of laser light that cuts a cross-section through his hands—and said, “Our goals are primarily about affect, about people’s attitude toward things.” He observed the boy, who was still busy jogging. “We inspire lots of different kinds of behavior.”