While I agree that mathematicall ability can very much improve with time and hard work, I still think that there are "math people". However, it's largely a matt

While I agree that mathematicall ability can very much improve with time and hard work, I still think that there are "math people". However, it's largely a matter of interest, not ability. I know my case: I'm not a bright person at all, yet I've loved maths since I was... like 4, maybe less. I used to climb to shelves to get my siblings' math books from older courses and read them with passion, resulting in anecdotes like understanding negative numbers at 5 or knowing what a square root was at 6. I hold the firm belief that any child (any without development problems, at least) could understand those concepts, and many others more complex than those, at similar ages. However, very few will do, for the simple reason that they would rather spend time with a few friends and a ball than surrounded by books; I won't blame them. And just like I was the mathy boy, I was also the clumsy boy at PE, because I used to spend much less time running or playing soccer. It ends being a matter of frequency: most children will prefer playing than reading or doing math, so at those ages the normal boy has developed a much better ability for sports than for maths. Because of that, ability for sports is regarded as normal, and everyone accepts that most people can start exercising at later ages; we all have the required gears. Maths, on the other hand, is still something that few kids develop deeply enough, and because of that, it's regarded as uncommon, which in turns causes most people to believe that it's a matter of innate ability instead of hard work. That said, teaching maths is tremendously hard, which is another big factor. I developed most, if not all, of my mathematical epiphanies by myself. The task of learning maths is difficult to direct from outside.