Comment by wakawaka28

I'm not making any political statement here, or at least that was not my intention. Life is short and there are infinite things we could be learning about. The advanced math I'm talking about avoiding here is not recreational math, but you could potentially apply the same logic to recreational math. Personally I see a big difference between "routine" abstract/advanced math and recreational math, though there can be some overlap. People have written books about what makes a pleasant puzzle, for example. Some puzzles are deceptively simple to state and impossible to solve without elite level theories. I think one of the characteristics of a good puzzle is that it can be solved with reasonable effort and not consume your whole life. Another is that it not be so contrived and abstract, that you need to be heavily initiated to even understand it. The worst are the ones that require a ton of mechanical computations even after you figure out the key insight. I don't think those are very fun either. But then again, there are people who don't get tired of Sudoku lol...