Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.  (250-650 words)
Mathematics seems to be slowly becoming a forgotten art.  That’s not to say that we are simply getting worse at calculations.  Rather, as time goes on, fewer and fewer understand that mathematics is more than shuffling numbers. True mathematics can be described in a lot of ways, but I feel that it’s best to call it the art--yes, art--of finding patterns.
Contrary to most of mathematics education, mathematics isn’t a rote subject with one goal of isolating whichever variable onto one side of the equation. It’s the study of self-consistent systems, and the phenomena arising from it.  It is also not a purely utilitarian exercise; rather, mathematics is intrinsically beautiful, almost like a painting, and the applications that we find for it are only useful byproducts of the art of numbers.
In truth, mathematics is far more like painting than most would think.  It has rules, like a painter pays attention to form and color, but a mathematician and a painter can both break from convention and create new rules.  In reducing mathematics to a routine process devoid of innovation, we not only divorce it from the deeper and universal truths the numbers represent, we make the creation of new mathematics impossible.  It was thought to be impossible to take an even root of a negative number, after all, up until it was done regardless, and found self-consistent.  In fact, looking further back, the same could be said for the now-universal negative numbers, and even zero.  One could characterize all of the history of mathematics as taking on these “impossible” problems, and finding them very possible with a bit of imagination. By removing this part of mathematics, we remove its potential for continued exploration, and while enough rediscover these truths on their own that the field of mathematics is safe from dying out, it’s a tragedy that we would obscure that truth to begin with.
It deeply saddens me that mathematics has been conflated with arithmetic.  As a culture, we’ve taken the universal truth and utter beauty and boiled it down to the base, trivial components.  Referring to mathematics as though it were those components is like saying literature is only the study of letters.  The latter is integral to the former, but they’re mere tools for approaching a deeper truth.