[bkovitz]

Yup, motivation is the blocker.

I have repeatedly gotten tired of math when it seemed like meaningless puzzle-solving. Why do I really care, for example, how many nonabelian groups of order 36 exist? When math seems to me like it's providing a vocabulary for framing and answering deep questions about the world, or making it computationally feasible to find the stamp of causal influence in data or design real things that are impossible to make without out, then the motivation is there.

This might just be an artifact of the way math is often taught. For example, real analysis is often taught as meaningless proof-finding (e.g. proving things that seem either pointless or obvious). But there's a fantastic book, _A Radical Approach to Real Analysis_ by David Bressoud, that teaches the exact same subject matter as the fruit of deep, pressing, and non-obvious questions that stirred debate among mathematicians for around 100 years.

[manvsmachine]

Many branches of math start out as being "meaningless". Number theory was once widely considered meaningless until it was given importance through cryptography. The current head of Microsoft's Cambridge research location literally said to Bill Gates as she was being hired that her work was completely unrelated to computer science; her work was in combinatorial optimization. I think that may be a part of the problem: not enough math professors teach their subjects with any regards to what they are used for. Sometimes, they don't even know themselves.