Whoa, I saw this thread.

Being a college student majoring in maths and having participated in math olympiads before, I've seen and used math a lot. For me, I view maths as an amusing thing to learn, but unfortunately not many people could ever learn math to reach the "amusing" part before they suffer math anxiety. While many people got afraid with math and only see "one rule under your nose" math problems (that is, one that you memorize the formulas while not necessarily understanding what they mean), I was very fortunate to love math and to have seen math problems that require brilliant approaches and unconventional thought processes before solving them. I look at a mathematical work much like art-loving people looking at artworks; I could see the beauty of a mathematical work while mathophobic (is that a word) people wondered what the heck it was, much like art-loving people could see the beauty of an artwork while I wondered what the heck it was.

That being said, however, does not mean that I love and am good at everything math. Math itself consists of several subdisciplines, and I'm not an all-rounder. Inside the math department, people still hate some parts of math and love some others. I myself, for example, love combinatorics and algebra but hate statistics and differential equations (in my college, statistics is considered a part of mathematics). And in parts that I hate and am not good at, I give that "how the heck" reaction as well. Then I understood what happens. Many people "missed the link" between the math problem and the seemingly out of the blue formula to solve it.