No it's not. Plenty of people don't like math and it has nothing to do with how the universe works. The way that math is taught to most people is absolutely atrocious, involving rote memorization, following rules for the sake of following rules, very little intuition involved.
If anything, most people who express a hatred of math do so because it's taught to them in a way that completely divorces it from the universe or anything whatsoever.
Most people I know who appreciate math did not learn it at school, but learned it either at home from their parents, or learned it independently. I have also made it my own responsibility to make sure my daughter learns math from me and applies math to every day situations and can develop a basic mathematical intuition.
> The way that math is taught to most people is absolutely atrocious, involving rote memorization, following rules for the sake of following rules, very little intuition involved.
The older I get the more I realize the importance of memorization if you want to _actually_ apply maths to solve problems, as opposed to learning for the pleasure of it. When I was a kid I was all about the ideas.
So there is definitely a subtlety here, which is not that memorization is bad in and of itself, but that learning things by memorizing them is a very short term strategy for actual understanding.
For example I use math on an almost daily basis working as a quant, and so yes I happen to have memorized a great deal of math. But that memorization did not happen by sitting and explicitly memorizing things, memorizing formulas, memorizing rules or procedures or theorems. The memorization came over time and through repeated usage naturally.
But the way math is taught at school, students are kind of pushed into a corner where if they want to do well on the test, the quiz, the exams then the path of least resistance is to memorize a narrow set of specific "material" that will be tested and then hyper fixating on that material by employing memorization.
Which is easy to say if it's something you use a lot. But many things are just stepping stones to, or the fundamentals of, the part you do use a lot.
I never gave it much thought in school, but I'm glad we did things like memorize multiplication tables. Being able to instantly know all multiplications of numbers up to 12 makes reasoning about numbers much faster.
That's probably true for the vast majority of things, isn't it?
I also hate ballet, but I suspect that if I made an effort I would learn to appreciate it. However, I don't make it a point to go around loudly telling everyone that I hate ballet as if that was a badge of honor.
