Math is more interesting, purely as math, as I get older. I found the same is true for history as well. The trick is to find good history authors for the particular time you are interested in. Same with math.

I graded very well in math through college, but later in life, I went back and explored more how all the concepts relate. In college, you are sort of fed calculus through a fire hose, and you just have to 'accept it' and move on. And you are left wondering, how were these ideas, these conclusions, reached? Until you go back through and see the long history of infinite series and see the various attempts to codify solutions. The problem is, as a student, you cannot possibly spend that much time deriving the whole solution from scratch and still hope to finish a degree in four years. As Carl Sagan said “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

Which is why you can never stop learning. I am in my mid 60s, and I still learn something new regularly. Something big at least once a year, something smaller at least once a month. Never stop learning.

I meant that mathematics has been used for nuclear bombs, breaking cryptography, and other nefarious purposes. Physics is a sort of applied mathematics, where reality is the testing ground for models created on paper.

It was originally thought that Einstein's theory of special relativity was just a cool mathematical idea. But it was much much more. Mathematics has consequences that are so deep that even now it is rearing its head in AI..differentiable loss functions.