Well, I am a cranky professor, and if you did your graduate work in modelling, then you are forgiven for having missed the fact that most of what mathematicians do is prove things. (OTOH, I am worried that high school math no longer seems to contain a sufficient dose of proofs in the geometry course, so that a high school math teacher makes the claim that a little exercise in proof is “not math”.)
LOL. Then you are forgiven.
I dearly love math but realize that some people are so intimidated by it that they actually freeze up when facing simple puzzles. Some of the folks on this thread seem to suffer that malady.