I’m a physicist, so I’m biased, but my experience of pure maths was about the same. We had to do it, but at no point was any utility actually demonstrated - that was left to the physics professors. It was all just “look at this thing I can do with these symbols” without any actual tangible relationship to anything.

Then again, I remember how we were taught calculus at high school - we were taught how to mechanistically integrate and derive everything under the sun. At no point did anyone think to explain that we were measuring the areas under curves, or their rates of change - it was all just “memorise this operation”. Again it was left to the physics teachers to explain why this was useful, and what we were actually doing.

Poor teaching, if you ask me, and it more often than not left me retrospectively wondering if said mathematicians had actually understood any of what they did, or if they just had little blind symbol manipulation Turing machines in their heads.

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5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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charcircuit 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>At no point did anyone think to explain that we were measuring the areas under curves, or their rates of change

In my experience you get taught the definition of a derivative of a function at a point is equal to the instantaneous rate of change and that integrals are defined as a Reimann Sum, the sum of the area under the curve. Everything in the class comes from building on top of those definitions.

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hks0 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That you think this way (and if like me, it makes you excited!) I think it's because it has clicked for you.

For many that light bulb above their head doesn't flash on, hence they get to dislike the subject or forget it after they are done with their studies. I was lucky enough to appreciate math that much to redo it in my free time after high-school and make it click for me.

	▲	plorkyeran 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, my calculus class in HS very literally started with finding the area under a curve “manually” and introduced integration as a generalization of that. I’m not surprised to hear that calculus is sometimes taught very poorly, but it’s not universal.