[bitL]

There is a huge disconnect between intuitive mathematics and the formalized one taught at universities since the middle of the 20th century due to Bourbaki's group. For many people this emptied mathematics and made it inaccessible to a large portion of population, making them 2nd class citizens of the future, group which would be otherwise capable of mastering it with a proper pedagogical style.

IMO this is a pedagogical insanity, flooding young kids with formalisms that took centuries to emerge without any explanation about their background and enforcing form over content, which is what cuts many super talented people and forces them to focus at different fields.

There are many problems with contemporary math that are conveniently avoided (binary logic for example - most of the population doesn't believe it has any connection to thinking due to weirdness of material implication and teacher's insistence that this is the right way to think, never mentioning that its distant father Aristotle was so discontent with it that he immediately developed a first proto-modal logic), etc. If some constructionists and intuitionists weren't going against the scientific current, we wouldn't have had computers for a long time.

[peterjancelis]

I always really liked math in school, cause it was just logic and that appeals to my lazy side. I was good at it too.

The last 2 years of high school, however, I had picked the 8 hour math options (25% of total course time) and the fun was quickly beaten out of it by having to learn formal ways to write a proof. Saying the same thing in plain language was 'invalid'.

From that point on math felt more like learning a foreign language than about doing logic.

[axm]

Math is a formalism of everyday logical reasoning. It's the difference between a formal language and English.

Learning rigorous mathematics is frustrating at first because the veracity of a statement can seem intuitively obvious but difficult to prove. However it is a key stepping stone to modern mathematics and will considerably sharpen your intuition after you've gone through the process.

[ww2]

That is correct. Math is a language more than 'logic'/patterns'/ and any other metaphors.

[eli_gottlieb]

That's because your brain implements a weakly truth-preserving plausibility logic, whereas real mathematics makes use of strongly truth-preserving formal logic.

[jacobolus]

Blaming Bourbaki for this seems to give them credit for far more than the influence they had. They did cause an entire generation of professional French mathematicians to waste effort on re-proving things that had already been proven.

But the trend toward (excessive?) formalism at the expense of intuitive understanding is much larger in scope than Bourbaki.

[leoc]

No-one in logic even pretends that the material conditional is in general an adequate representation of natural-language conditionals anymore. It's fine in the context of mathematics though.