I lost interest in maths in high school when I realized that the problems we were solving were specifically designed to be solvable with the techniques we were

I lost interest in maths in high school when I realized that the problems we were solving were specifically designed to be solvable with the techniques we were taught. Their generality was specious. This was at an expensive private school, in the so-called advanced maths stream... I much preferred programming, because things made sense there. You could work things out. Even the instruction set for the Z-80 processing I was coding for was more consistent and general than the maths I was taught. The compound instructions were obviously compound, and - and this is the best part - the aspects that I didn't understand enriched me when I finally did understand them (I realized they had machine code support for structs, before I'd heard of structs - I 'invented' structs because my code needed the concept). Today, after bachelor, masters and not-yet-submitted doctorate in Computer Science, the maths I see in papers still seems technique-based rather than about the truth. I use set-builder notation, and grammar notation (regular expression and CFG syntax), but only because it is logically consistent, not because it's "mathematics". It seems to me that there isn't any way to learn the true mathematics - the mathematics that is our heritage as human beings - except by the good fortune of finding someone who does understand it, or long and personal study, using historical sources, because these are the only ones that show the point of the techniques - why they are useful. There must be good text books out there, but the ones I've seen either dive into obscure notation, or use inadequate metaphors. Disclaimer: The only maths I took at uni were taught by the engineering dept. Maybe maths taught by the maths department might have helped me. Actually, my very best comp sci lecturer was from the maths dept - he took care to make it logical.