William Thurston, who died on August 21 at the age of 65, would have hated this post’s headline. Let me tell you why it’s justified.

In 1993, when I was a full-time staff writer for Scientific American , my boss, Jonathan Piel, asked, or rather, commanded me to write an in-depth feature on something, anything, mathematical. Fercrissake, I was an English major! I whined. I could fake math knowledge for little news stories about the Mandelbrot set or Fermat’s last theorem but a major article would be too hard! I urged Jonathan to assign the piece to my math-whiz colleague Paul Wallich. Piel was adamant. He wanted me, the ignoramus, to do it.