That’s actually kind of strange, because there is a lot of history going back at least a couple of thousand years indicating that people seriously studied mathematics to understand the underpinnings of the world they perceived.
It wasn’t until the 40s that physicist finally admitted there had to be a place for mathematics. Schroedinger was largely responsible for this.
Today’s teachers probably couldn’t pass an 8th grade (primary school) exit exam from1950. Or get through a McGuffy reader from 1930.
Snowflakes, creating more snowflakes. Unlike our past:
http://www.rense.com/general75/pass.htm
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3744163
http://www.barefootsworld.net/1895finalexam.html
That changed in the 1800s when Oliver Heavyside threw out 196 of Maxwell’s theorems keeping only four which he changed from field to vector equations thus giving us all we know about the entire electromagnetic spectrum - without which both Tesla and Einstein would have remained obscure. No one has ever gone back since Tesla and looked at the original theorems because they are too hard and the original book by Maxwell is extremely difficult to find.