> That said, for most people the purpose of school is to prepare them to be able to support themselves and their families, and it sounds like he's basically able to do that now.

The real question you have to ask is whether you can do both (impractical and practical) -- if you can do both, then it is clearly better than doing one.

You may not realize it now, but a lot of things that seem impractical can become very useful (or at the very least, fascinating) when provided with the right context. For example, if you ever want to learn about how your computer works on the inside, knowing basic physics will give you better perspective on what's happening. More obscure stuff like Quantum Tunneling starts appearing in technologies like NAND flash memory -- it's not necessarily practical to know all that, but I'm very happy that I know it.

Forget I even said anything.

Veritasium - http://www.youtube.com/user/1veritasium

Sixty Symbols - http://www.sixtysymbols.com/

Periodic Videos - http://www.periodicvideos.com/

Crash Course - http://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse

The Brain Scoop - http://www.youtube.com/thebrainscoop

Smarter Every Day - http://www.youtube.com/destinws2

Vi Hart - http://www.youtube.com/vihart

George Hart - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTl0dASnxto6j2wlVs5Bs2Q

Numberphile - http://www.numberphile.com/

Vsauce - http://www.youtube.com/user/Vsauce

TED-Ed - http://www.youtube.com/teded

MinuteEarth - http://www.youtube.com/user/minuteearth

You don't know what you don't know. You can have a fine career in programming without math -- but with math you can have many great careers.

Keep taking math and working hard at it. Stop when it gets too hard.

Two of my three favorite classes in college were math classes -- combinatorics and algorithms.