A modern fable
This is a story about the worlds greatest failure. The story is true, the people in it are real, just some of the facts may not be right. If you are someone who thinks that facts are more important than the story then by all means write your own version. Once upon a time (as all good stories should begin) There were some people called mathematicians who were attempting to solve some particularly difficult problems. These problems were far more difficult than the numeracy problems you may get at school such as what is 7 x 9 or 169 x 27. In fact they were so difficult, mathematician's would find them very hard to describe even to other mathematician's. One day two mathematicians called Alfred Whitehead and Bertrand Russell decided that one of the reasons that the problems were so difficult was that no one really understood why mathematics worked at all. They often did things like this because as well as being very good at numbers, they were both something we call philosophers