I have attended some events devoted to “math appreciation”; those events tend to attract several people with different levels of knowledge of mathematics, and the topics covered tend to be broad enough to hopefully satisfy a large audience. I then suppose the purpose of those events is to help or encourage people to “appreciate” mathematics, as the name and the nature of the activities suggest, but I still wonder what “to appreciate mathematics” could mean. If one focuses on meaning of words, the Latin root of “to appreciate”, appretiare, and from it comes pretium, meaning price, seems to suggest that to appreciate something is to put some value on it, not necessarily pecuniary. However, I am not sure if this meaning of appreciation would necessarily involve emotional attachment to the subject, while the converse seems to be plausible. Hopefully, someone will help me clarify this matter.

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