Why study mathematics?

Really, is there anything behind warm fuzzy things and myriads of (meaningless) symbols?

Mathematics is perceived as something abstract, and (therefore, perhaps?) inapplicable to "real-world problems" by many people.

When asked "why study mathematics", my mathematics teachers mumbled something about "self-development", "all-round education", but failed to give compelling examples.
Coupled with fallacies, I think it is because of that do many people think that mathematics is too disconnected from reality.

I'm going to argue that it isn't the case. While you may never apply knowledge gained from certain fields of mathematics throughout your career, it doesn't mean anything except, well, that it just happened you didn't need it! I think there are people who have successfully applied their knowledge.

On a related note, there are many fields studied in mathematics. Do you really think they just appeared from nowhere? There has to be a motivation for all this somewhere, however, in my experience most teachers fail to convey it.

So, why study mathematics? That's the question!
I'll try to summarize the benefits here, though you should be able to find better-worded (or otherwise superior) introductions elsewhere.

Mathematics helps to succinctly describe and reason about models of your problem domain (in other words, it allows you to clearly see what's essential to the solution of your problem and what's distracting and useless). It also helps to find relations between models: that makes it even more interesting!

"So it's all good in theory", you say, "demonstrate your points". This is where I start mumbling something about "all-round education", "self-development", and such things...

What is this all about?

Hello,

My name is Artyom Shalkhakov. I am a software engineer interested in mathematics, theoretical computer science, declarative programming, and other such things. I have many interests besides that, but I don't think I'll write about them here. (I don't think it's appropriate or interesting to anyone else but my family and close friends, so there you have it.)

This blog is about all things technical.