Math is a formalism of everyday logical reasoning. It's the difference between a formal language and English.
Learning rigorous mathematics is frustrating at first because the veracity of a statement can seem intuitively obvious but difficult to prove. However it is a key stepping stone to modern mathematics and will considerably sharpen your intuition after you've gone through the process.
That is correct. Math is a language more than 'logic'/patterns'/ and any other metaphors.
Re:You never did math in high school
by eli_gottlieb on Monday May 05, 2014 @11:30AM
(#7699097)
That's because your brain implements a weakly truth-preserving plausibility logic, whereas real mathematics makes use of strongly truth-preserving formal logic.
The last 2 years of high school, however, I had picked the 8 hour math options (25% of total course time) and the fun was quickly beaten out of it by having to learn formal ways to write a proof. Saying the same thing in plain language was 'invalid'.
From that point on math felt more like learning a foreign language than about doing logic.