In America, there is a funny, and revealing, version of mathematics.
One popular joke is that, at a dinner party, the only socially acceptable thing to be bad at is mathematics. Someone recalls high school and says they are terrible at math, another says, me too, and everybody laughs. This is not so common in other countries. America is not unique, but this is a recognizable piece of day to day American culture. Americans are rarely proud of being bad at anything, yet mathematics is the one domain where the common American can sound almost pleased to be incompetent.
Americans often connect academic effort with outcome. A scholarship, a job, a credential, a title, a salary. So how does one convince American families that mathematics matters for a child’s education if the payoff is not immediate, or even legible? This is part of the motivation behind the Clay Mathematics Institute putting serious money behind difficult, century class problems. There is an old story, I cannot remember whether it comes from von Neumann or someone adjacent. The idea is simple: attach a financial reward to hard mathematics so American parents can tell their kids to study it because there is a concrete outcome.
This is very different from what drives professional mathematicians at the top of the field, like Andrew Wiles, who solved one of the great century class problems. I recall watching a documentary on him, and in one interview he cried while talking about the moment it finally worked. He was not crying because of money, status, or career positioning. He was crying because he had touched mathematical beauty. Many engineers, and many students in engineering courses, do not fully register how powerful that can be, the lived experience of beauty in a symbolic language that does not need a practical pretext.