I don’t think this applies to everyone but the major difference I have found between people who enjoy math and those who don’t lies primarily in how they do math. People who don’t like math usually learn and reproduce the subject by memorizing formulas and using them as tools to solve problems where as people who enjoy mathematics typically seek to understand why those formulas work and often rederive them. For the former who didn’t take the time or was not interested in learning the laws that govern math, the subject is a slog of searching your tool box for the correct tool. Sometimes numerous times until you find the one that works, though often not knowing why it worked and the others did not. For the latter it is like a language they have become fluent in. The indentification of which tool they need has become second nature and they will sometimes design tools specific to their needs.

Edit: I saw all this from my experience as a physics major for most of my undergrad. This primarily comes from what I observed in other physics majors so this could be somewhat skewed info. I’m certain there are people who understood math from the roots up and still hated it. Puzzles like that aren’t for everyone and I certainly got tired of it by the time I reached up level math.

Asking why people don’t like something is probably the wrong way to approach this. Ask why people do like it and then you will say that some people will not appreciate the qualities mentioned.

But maths is hard, objectively. It’s abstract and it’s about logic and the precise application of rules and a lot of people are just not good at those things.

The heart of doing maths is solving puzzles. Not practical puzzles like “how do I build a cool robot” (though maths comes up in engineering of course) but puzzles that are posed without necessarily having any relation to the real world. “Prove that the limit of this sequence is 2” - “what for?” It’s like doing sudoku or crosswords, if that doesn’t tickle your brain, you won’t like it.

I like math just fine up until trigonometry and at that point my brain just can’t hold onto it. Failed college calculus three times. There’s something about the formulas and rules and applications that isn’t intuitive for me at that level. I’m much better at the Earth Sciences and had no problems with chemistry.

“Liking” math isn’t really accurate either. I don’t care about math, I care about things that require math. Geometry and algebra are useful in a ton of other disciplines and activities. Playing with numbers doesn’t make me feel smart or accomplished the way a puzzle does.

I loved math. In 8th grade I was taking 10th grade math. Going into high school, they didn’t accept the advanced course credit and made me retake 9th and 10th grade math. I slept through the classes, passing all the same. From my perspective the teachers appeared to dislike me, not caring about content I already knew, disrespecting them by sleeping and coasting through their class. By 11th grade when I finally reached new content, I didn’t care anymore; math class remained naptime all the same.

Why would I like math? It’s just numbers and logic. Why do you think that should be fun?

I disliked math because I would always do poorly on timed math problems in grade school. I couldn’t memorize things and still can’t, but I can work through problems and know how to look up theorems. This continued through grade school until college.

after struggling on calculus for my major, then switching majors and oddly having to take algebra, I found math to be easy to the point that my teacher told me I could skip the final and still ace the class.

I still hate math. I liked that Numbers tv show though.

I’m good at math but I’m slow at it. I would need my own time to solve a problem. But school always needed it done in a very short amount of time.

I’ve grown in appreciation for math in the last couple of years, especially when it comes to things that are necessary or practical in my day to day life.

I hated it in school though, mostly because of bad teachers, I think, and because it’s an area of study with cut and dry answers.

I always preferred subjects where there were many possible answers to a question, like philosophy and such.

I was plenty good at maths up to the point where I couldn’t study more (as in, my other subject choices locked me out of taking the next stage, A-level). However in general I found the more complex stuff abstract and characterless.

For example statistics bored me. We’re working out the upper quartile something something? To what end?

I’ve used maths for accounts, programming, carpentry, and so forth, but that’s always been fairly basic stuff. The more advanced stuff has never been of the slightest value to me (I still don’t know why I, a layman, should give a shit about factorisation, prime numbers, happy numbers, etc…). I am not saying that it has no value - simply that to me personally it might as well be memorising the principles behind a naming scheme for shades of grey paint. I can learn the principles and they make sense, but so what?

I pretty much felt the same way about the higher levels of chemistry. Oh these are ionic bonds? Okay…?

My teachers were excellent and enthusiastic (my entire maths class got the highest grade possible, myself included) but I don’t really see what there is to like. I didn’t dislike it, I was just indifferent. The easier stuff could be like a basic puzzle game, the more complex stuff I could apply the system I learned and provide the correct, if pointless, answer.

It felt like being taught someone else’s complex system for sorting different sizes of white paper, I suppose I could say.

Shit teacher. I had a good teacher one year and it turned out I wasn’t actually bad at maths.

I had to take algebra 1 twice in highschool. The fist time I took a college level course, and failed, but passed my second year in the gen course. I then failed algebra 2 miserably, though I will say that year was wild for me, and I didn’t really have fucks for math class. I half assed it and was not surprised I failed. You can’t half ass math class.

For me, was that if I missed one lesson, it began this giant snowball effect where I couldn’t catch up, so in case of my first year algebra, I gave up and failed. It’s the only class I ever failed.

The class moved really fast, and I have adhd (unknown to me then). I could thrive in English, History ect because the lessons are structured differently. Math, you dont viciously pay attention, or need more time, I couldn’t keep up with its pacing in highschool. Once imaginary numbers were introduced, I just, yeah.

I enjoy solving problems and tinkering, in math class the problem were always way too theoretical. In physics that same math became interesting because it had an application.

I just don’t care for it. I know it matters and makes up all our rules for the physical world and everything but it’s not interesting to me. I’m much more interested in social/psychological studies of life, so math talk just flies over my head most of the time.

Also would agree with you about the educational system though. Growing up I was always held back and taken aside because I wasn’t doing the math either fast enough or “the right way”. I learned different tricks for multiplication than were taught at my school, but I would get to the correct answer. I was punished for this. It also shouldn’t matter how fast you can do math, as long as you’re getting the right answer. I fucking hated “math minutes” and had a lot of shitty teachers. Had some good ones too though.

It was fine until some insane motherfucker decided to get the alphabet involved. Nope, fuck your x to the power of a squared equals unknown, I’ll stay over here where the sane people are.

Geometry is okay I guess. Shapes and shit. Much better than letters.

Because through my game development career I learned to solve mathematical problems algorithmically, and my brain is just structured that way, I cannot do formulas. Well I can, but it takes active fighting against my brain structure.

I think a lot of it comes down to how people were taught math.

In my generation, it was almost all rote memorization. You memorize times tables. You memorize the steps to do long division. You memorize specific formulas. And then you have to draft it all into proofs to explain why things work, but you were never really taught why things work in the first place. The answer was always “It just does.”

Rather than rote memorization, a better use of time for younger students is to focus more on the logic of math, to really get that “why” component before asking them to complete dozens of repetitive problems for homework.

Other parts of it might also just come down to entertainment value, to be honest. Here’s where my perspective veers further into anecdote, but maybe it rings true for others, I don’t know.

Learning about aphantasia was a new one for me. I don’t have it, but I am acquainted with two people who do, and both of those people did well at math in school but hated history and literature. On the other hand, those were my favorite subjects, because being able to immerse myself in a story or put myself in a certain time and place made those subjects more bearable, sometimes fun.

It occurred to me that the way they felt reading books was probably a lot like how I felt doing math: just a lot of reading information on a page and memorizing important details to regurgitate later for some assessment or another. But for them, the logic of math probably made that subject easier to engage with than something as vague as an author’s intent.