> Part of the problem here is what is meant by "math"... it is a shame that someone could get as far as second year university math in the US and still see it as a field where you simplify things to the point where you can apply a formula to arrive at the one right answer. In Ross Hunter's defense, he didn't say that's all that math is, he said "People who are good at math are good at breaking problems down into parts, recognizing patterns, and applying known formulae to those parts to arrive at the one right answer."
I think it's reasonable to assume, given what he stated, that Ross does in fact conceive of math that way. It blows my mind that one can get through a discrete math class and still think of math as basically computational in nature, since as far as I know most curricula treat the course as an opportunity to introduce the sort of concepts that typically figure into an introduction-to-higher-mathematics-type course, such as proof techniques, basic number theory, and so on.