One of my favorite stories my grandfather tells goes like this: Sometime in the mid 1950s as a high school freshman he steps into a classroom, sees an algebraic expression on the board and says to his teacher: “I thought this is math. What’s with all of those letters?”
Decades later I waged my own battles against math, its problems and the increasingly frustrated but saintly individuals who attempted to teach me.
My struggle continued into data science grad school where my passion for shaping and presenting data far outweighed my willingness to apply mathematical proofs to ML models.