This thread struck a nerve with me. As a kid I loved math, did all the math contest stuff, even won one at one point, skipped a year in math. I went to visit my

This thread struck a nerve with me. As a kid I loved math, did all the math contest stuff, even won one at one point, skipped a year in math. I went to visit my old retired math teacher a couple of weeks ago, he's in his 80s. In school I never had a problem with speed or understanding, nor at university. But what hit me was the realization that "actual math" is probably not a load of little riddles. I often wondered how I'd ever solve something that someone hadn't contrived to have an elegant solution, something completely new and insightful that nobody had proven before. There's quite a leap from your tricky olympiad problem that you can find a good video for, and proofs of things in higher math. The other thing that struck me was that our current system destroys all appreciation for beauty. There's so many beautiful things in math, but we're forced to calculate, quickly. Especially in the engineering side I went into, it ended up becoming very mechanical.