‘When studying mathematics my biggest surprise was...’

When we studied maths at school the subject seemed to be an endless rephrasing of the same problem the problem of finding ‘x’. As we progressed through the years we gradually learnt new ways of finding ‘x’ in various guises. Sometimes in simultaneous equations maybe in the angle of a triangle or the answer to a differential equation - but in the end it was always was about methods of how to find and calculate ‘x’. Indeed for many people this is what maths means to them the ‘finding x’ maths from school.