Germany, but I think it's similar across much of Europe. The US has a different university structure: the way I understand it, many people don't necessarily ch

Germany, but I think it's similar across much of Europe. The US has a different university structure: the way I understand it, many people don't necessarily choose a major early on or can easily switch it which is why engineers, mathematicians, biologists, etc. often take the same course. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Over here, this is much rarer. Sometimes computer scientists or physicists take some of the same courses as mathematicians, but hardly engineers. Therefore, we can probably afford to be more theoretical right away (although the computer scientists sometimes complain xD). I can totally understand that for someone with a focus on application theory is less important, and that some people can get more excited about what you can do with matrices e.g. in computer graphics or machine learning than about abstract morphisms and rigorous proofs. Incidentally, over here I sometimes feel we learn stuff the other way around: first we hear all the theory, but it's only in the later ODE and numerical methods courses that we actually get substantial practice in calculating more complicated integrals or learn about e.g. QR factorisation or Simpson's rule (although we do prove error bounds by then).