> I’ve long felt that math was one of those things that everyone could agree is a useful and beneficial thing for humanity in general

Funny, I think it's a very widespread opinion to think of math as useless. In the US at least it's a major failure of the education system and STEM communicators.

> and it was one of the least divisive fields, where people from different parts of world, from different stations in life could participate, and very few points, especially today, caused any controversy (unlike just about every other subject).

There's plenty of controversy in mathematics. Controversy comes from the people, not the field of study.

> Funny, I think it's a very widespread opinion to think of math as useless. In the US at least it's a major failure of the education system and STEM communicators.

That is a US centric view, and it's curious how things came to be that way. European and Asian countries take mathematics more seriously.

How useless? Terence Tao made MRIs faster. That's a real thing that STEM and non-STEM people will maybe have to interact with at some point in their lives. Sure, we can blame science communicators. Should we put a bunch of banner ads on everything so that people know that math and science is involved in every thing?

I know there is some controversy, I would say that the field of study also “causes” controversy in a sense if the disagreement has to do with the subject itself, that is true for any field. For example, set theory “caused” significant controversy in the early years of its development, yes it was people in disagreement and insulting one another, but the fundamental questions were from the subject matter itself.

Regarding widespread perception of math as useless, I guess I was thinking mainly of academic circles rather than the general public in that statement. Even while I hated math, I knew it wasn’t useless because my late father (who was a civil engineer) was very good at it, and he was adamant on teaching it to us. It didn’t work on me back then though lol.

As I was getting more interested in math while getting my degree in computer science, I realized much of my own issue with math earlier in life was because of the same thing just about everyone else that struggles with it has: the lack of any practical relevance in my own life because of how it’s generally taught. And the fact that many math teachers themselves don’t know the foundational/philosophical aspects of the subject, which would go a long way I think towards explaining that relevance if introduced in some pieces earlier on, rather than treating it like a rote memorization subject and being so focused on continual practice to develop heuristics with exercises that some students couldn’t care less about. Of course, that works for some people clearly, but it didn’t for me at the time and I’m of the opinion high schools should focus more on discrete math like set theory, and formal logic rather than calculus, which is of little relevance at that stage unless you’re also invested in studying physics. Sets and logic on the other hand imo are general enough right at the beginning to be relevant to just about everything people of just about any age are concerned with.