I love mathematics. It's mentally stimulating, and keeps my brain from going completely to rot. Hell, sometimes when I'm unable to play games/read/watch TV/whatever, I'll just start doing math problems out of sheer boredom, just so my brain doesn't go to waste.

I'd try to use physics in the things I write... but unfortunately, I failed that class. The only class I've EVER failed, actually. That was very upsetting at the time, and failure is something I've never gotten used to.

I'd love to be able to incorporate it, though. Like explaining to a Sue just how much force that bullet is packing. Said bullet is as thick as my thumb, and being fired from an anti-tank rifle.

But I'm currently in my second year of maths at Uni. I love maths, not all parts of maths I'll admit (Damned statistics) but as a whole and as a subject it's a real beauty of a thing to study. I've always liked maths, and I've always been good at it, and I've watched others through my school life just struggle at it, and indeed, especially in GCSE, using sayings like the ones you've mentioned. I think, in some ways there is discipline to be learnt through maths, but it's got to be uncovered, and that is where most people fall short, they can't do it for whatever reason and after their education is finished they leave maths behind quoting "I'll never need it again." Forgetting how much it'll still crop up in their everyday lives (it is an interesting thought, think about just how much maths comes into your lives on a normal day).

The thing is however, that at the moment at Uni, I'm really starting to see just where Maths comes into play in the real world, Statistics being used to not just find out probabilities but being used so that trials for life changing drugs can be done quickly, efficiently and effectively, I see Operational Research algorithms and the like that can be applied to anything from making sure trains and planes run on time to making sure your favourite store doesn't run out of stock of a particular item and making sure it makes as much a profit (at the lowest cost) possible, we've used programming languages to sort out huge quantities of data for us and then work out whether the normal distribution applies to it or not, whilst we can also write code to make a program solve a quartic equation at the press of a button.
The thing I'm trying to say is that maths ISN'T useless, it's not something that just belongs back at the classroom and has no real place at work, it's a really beautiful thing, a language that is expressed in so many ways and that expresses the fundamental workings of our society today. It's a real shame people want to tun their back on mathematics, because if they continue to do so they may just continue to turn their backs on the society they know and love, and watch it fall to pieces.

Storme Hawk

An afterthought: Have you seen how many people need a calculator to add things up these days?

I hate math.

I've struggled to scrape by in my math classes since fifth grade, though I've had problems since third grade. (It took me three months longer than everyone else to finally figure out how long division worked.) Someone asks me what 6x2 is, I panic and answer 24. For some reason, I have math anxiety and it all kind of steamrolls into one big vicious cycle: I panic, I mess up, I think 'I can't do this', I panic more. I wish I could say I was kidding when I say I had to retake a semester of Algebra II because I flunked it.

Of course, I suppose it could stem from my fifth grade teacher, who took an immense disliking to me on the first day. She started taking off points because I'd answer a question as .23 instead of 0.23, even though they're worth exactly the same. And she always belittled me, my math especially. I don't know why.

And pre-calculus really killed it for me when my teacher kept insisting polar coordinates were absolutely necessary for pilots. When I asked my dad (who is a pilot) about polar coordinates, he just gave me a blank look and said, "What?" He'd never heard of them and after I explained them, he said he's never had to use them in his twenty-some years of flying.

Numbers just don't 'click' for me. Even when presented with a simple problem, all I see is scribbles for a moment before I'm like, 'oh, numbers'. My parents had me tested for dyscalculia, but nope, that's not it either.

Tl;dr I either have some illogical hatred of math thanks to a vicious cycle of self-pity or my fifth grade teacher instilled it in me. Sorry if you were expecting an eloquent comparison of math to language. ^_^'

That I like as long as I understand what the problem wants me to do and how I'm supposed to do it. Which means I'm probably not going to take higher-level math courses like calculus or physics, but I'm perfectly all right with algebra and statistics and whatnot. Is this an acceptable thing to tell myself?

I love your theory, by the way. Why didn't my math teachers ever tell me that math taught discipline?!

Math is down there in the list of languages I don't want to study, along with Chinese (too complicated), Bahasa Indonesia (too obscure) and Etruscan (deader than Latin which, I might add, is the coolest language ever).

Personally, I have never really understood the vehemence with which some students dislike math. So far as I can determine, though, it is exactly like you describe it. They try this or that once, and when it doesn't immediately click they simply through their hands in the air in disgust and give up.

I grew up in an area with very high educational standards, and I was raised with that critical understanding that learning is crucial to one's success in life. Let me preface my next statement by saying that my old home was not some intellectual paradise, and I was often among those who simply phoned it in on certain mathematical principles when they were beyond my grasp.

That said, I moved for my last year of high school to a part of the country rather infamous for its low educational standards, and it was very noticeable from day one. Most glaringly, I was assigned to a math class teaching concepts I had learned two years before like they were new material. Obviously, this is simply a case of different curricula not lining up exactly, and we later went over at least one concept that I had learned more recently at the old school.

Still, my new home is worth mentioning because of the values dissonance that I noticed in just about every one of my new peers. I'm in a part of the country now that puts very little weight or import on education, and sometimes glorifies the state of being uneducated. Even among my naturally more intelligent friends, apathy toward their grades and the educational system in general is the norm.

This was noticeable in more subtle ways, as well. The standard of living for my teachers declined, the library shrunk, and the maintenance of the school itself went downhill. Both of the schools I attended were nearly equivalent as far as proximity to an urban center, the number of students present, and the classes offered. That said, the new school received a smaller budget and spent a larger percentage of that budget on funding the sports teams and various extra-curricular activities rather than the library or more advanced classes.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy the dances or the block party, and being the top student in several classes was definitely a good feeling, but sometimes I wonder how much more I would have learned if that last year had been in the same school as all the others instead of somewhere far away.

I have phrased it exactly that way for years and get immensely frustrated when people don't understand. I agree with every point. Actually, I do have this to add:

Physics is, as you said, fundamentally how we explain the phenomena of the universe, how it all fits together and works to create that which we experience. Mathematics is the language of physics--not just of the sweeping and grandiose gravitational movement of the stars and of our more familiar interactions, but of the workings of the tiniest subatomic particles and forces.

Language that is the language of literature is the language of the soul, if you will. It is what describes those experiences, life, emotion... everything so hard to define with science (even when we can quantify it with chemical reactions in the brain), and even use it to reach out beyond that other language. It is also a language of concept and which can be explored for its own sake, but it's all ultimately about that communication of experience. The interesting thing about mathematics is that like language, it can be explored for its own sake. It can be pure concept and abstraction, of concept and abstraction, but so many things considered 'pure math' have become applicable, and it often is--even if only by creating something astonishing.

How do I feel about this? One of the most wonderful days of my life, when I nearly cried, was seeing a proper real analysis derived proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. The way logic fit together, as the logic of mathematics must, was nearly heartbreaking.

Mathematics helps describe light, and therefore color, color which then gets combined for any number of arts. Mathematics aids in construction, of life, of architecture, of sets for theater performances. It can create glorious vector maps, fractals--algorithms are used to make those visualizations of what is being played in some music player programs. Mathematics is at the heart of music itself, in the vibrations of the air, in the ratios which determine what note is played, in the very rhythms and at least Western notation. Music taught me fractions. The two are inextricably intertwined.

In the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, Pythagoras proposed the Music of the Spheres. Today, string theory posits that at the heart of everything, tiny strings somehow vibrate to determine what tiny particle exists, or what force. From that possible tiny son to our everyday improvisational chaos to the endless dance of the stars, mathematics describes it all.

Mathematics is the language of the universe.

I have never been able to conceive of anything more beautiful than that.