[davehtaylor]

I had such a problem with this. At my college, the professor I had for my entire calc sequence once said, in response to a question about applications, "My degree is in pure math. I don't care how it's applied."

Thankfully(?) I was taking physics at the same time, so I did get to see how double and triple integrals and differential equations could be applied. But it frustrated me to no end that the person who was driving my math education cared so little about helping us understand it.

[gowld]

That's a poor professor of calculus. They should have been teaching real analysis instead. (In pure math, "Real" means "divorced from reality") Maybe a fine mathematician.

[internetman55]

I think the real means real numbers

[gowld]

Yes, exactly. Real numbers aren't real.

[internetman55]

Im not sure that real in the context of math means anything other than the real numbers or (at a stretch) existence. I agree with you. And no one talks about this but a priori i dont see why even the natural numbers have anything to do with reality either. "Counting" some objects seemingly would require a notion of the object and some way to determine whether each part of reality was or was not the object which already seems fairly abstract and removed from the world. I think certain parts of math just seem more intuitive to certain people

[MaxBarraclough]

Annoyingly they've also laid claim to 'proper' and 'normal'.