[revskill]

Math was born out of reality needs, not from thin air.

But due to the force of all kinds of artifical force (passing the exam, learn by heart all the formula, paying the college debts,..), the quality of books is bad. It's more like a boring dictionary in most of cases.

The Math way of thinking is very different from software engineering though: On math, it's more about How things is reasoned about, rather than on result. It's how Math created Math itself.

[MichaelRo]

Well for starters programmers are not engineers, calling them that is just putting lipstick on a pig, a feel-good title like "chief corporate luminosity enhancer" instead "window cleaner", calling chiropractors "doctors", putting police-like uniforms on mall shop security guards, etc. Pathetic and lame but the term has stuck.

When it comes to math, it's actually used by two distinct categories: real engineers and mathematicians. There's also physicists but they share the same trait with engineers: math is a tool and not a purpose. A mathematician will become very anal when you skip some tiny detail in a demonstration, like go from Taylor series expansion to Ito lemma by approximating dt^2 =~ 0 (I had this happen to me). An engineer (that is, me ;) couldn't give a funk since Ito lemma is a well known and already proven fact and they only use the quick derivation from Taylor expansion as a way to mentally remember the former when they need it for some actual, real-life use case.