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The most common question students have about mathematics is “when will I ever use this?” ...

So here is my list. The concrete, unambiguous skills that students of mathematics, when properly taught, will practice and that will come in handy in their lives outside of mathematics. Some of these are technical, the techniques that mathematicians use every day to reason about complex, multi-faceted problems. Others are social, the kinds of emotional intelligence one needs to succeed in a field where you spend almost all of your time understanding nothing. All of them are studied in their purest form in mathematics. The ones I came up with are,

* Discussing definitions
* Coming up with counterexamples
* Beciing wrong often and admitting it
* Evaluating many possible consequences of a claim
* Teasing apart the assumptions underlying an argument
* Scaling the ladder of abstraction

via Medium