Comment by tw1010

The closest thing to feeling like I had a genuine superpower came after I studied a bunch of pure mathematics – the (richly interconnected, actually conceptually easier to manipulate after you've grown accustomed to them) building blocks of applied mathematics – and was then able to dazzle people who had only been exposed to applied mathematics with genuinely new, and often beautiful, perspectives on things they thought they already understood the whole story of. Pure mathematics, like analysis and algebra, makes it all immensely more rich and personal.