I was at UC when Stephen Hawking came to "speak" -- sort of a lecture and book tour for A Brief History of Time, back in the late 1980s. He had been told by his editor that he would likely alienate about twenty percent of his readers for each and every equation in his original manuscript; and he also managed to complain that his then-new speech synthesizer made him "sound like an American" -- both of which received laughs.
I think that the only mathematical figure in that book was its price tag on the inner flap . . .