This is an interesting read, thank you for posting it.

It is worth noting that the author is a K-12 mathematics teacher and not a mathematics professor. Learning math at the K-12 level is probably different in many ways from learning math at the university level and above.

he first thing to understand is that mathematics is an art. The difference between math and the other arts, such as music and painting, is that our culture does not recognize it as such. Everyone understands that poets, painters, and musicians create works of art, and are expressing themselves in word, image, and sound. In fact, our society is rather generous when it comes to creative expression; architects, chefs, and even television directors are considered to be working artists. So why not mathematicians?

Why say that creative expression is limited to even the conventional 'artists' and the mathematicians? Is creativity not the province of those of us in science, who must bend our minds around questions, formulate theories, and often devise methodologies that have never been developed?

For that matter, there is a little bit of STEM in the arts: they use chemicals to paint on a canvas, new materials to craft sculptures, must understand to an extent that the buildings they design won't fall down, invent new kinds of art, invent new kinds of instruments and ways to manipulate vibrations in the air to produce sounds that move us...

Part of the problem is that nobody has the faintest idea what it is that mathematicians do. The common perception seems to be that mathematicians are somehow connected with science— perhaps they help the scientists with their formulas, or feed big numbers into computers for some reason or other. There is no question that if the world had to be divided into the “poetic dreamers” and the “rational thinkers” most people would place mathematicians in the latter category.

Again: "Poetic dreamers" and "rational thinkers"? Why can both not exist in the same person? There is a poeticness about the human desire to defeat disease and the elegance of the scientific process, or perhaps a particularly elegant bit of programming or an elegant theorem, and discovering new things about the universe with empirical investigation and rational thought is itself a way in which people dream and extend and express themselves; there is an element of rationality in the ways artists try to get people to appreciate their work and the ways in which they tug at people's heartstrings.

Nevertheless, the fact is that there is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music (which depend heavily on properties of the physical universe). Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.

Mathematics has a little bit of 'art' in it, as do medicine, science, and philosophy, but it, like - philosophy! - is in a class all its own in many ways.

Mathematicians do not make patterns, really. They often discover them, and they theorize about them. What I guess it's easiest to say they do is define patterns.