The Awkwardness of Talking About Mathematics

Many decades ago, back in late 1973, I was a teenager working at a Miami Shores firm as a records clerk.  Hank, one of the auditors there, one day randomly asked me if I knew about trigonometry and could explain to him the meaning of sine and cosine.  Having studied the basics of it all a year earlier, I patiently presented the concepts as I had learned them: starting with a circle of radius 1 and center (0,0) and then explaining cosines and sines as the x and y points on that circle where the line intersecting said circle goes through the origin and creates an angle with the x-axis (of which cosines and sines are functions).  But I didn't speak any of this by itself...I got pen and paper and illustrated it.  Ol' Hank then got very angry and said he only wanted to know about solving triangles using trigonometry (which I was on the way to covering) ...and I walked away, not in the least bit willing to accommodate that anger: screw him.  Hank was a contentious little so-and-so who would take history classes at the local community college just to argue with the instructor...a real ditto-head long before Rush Limbaugh would coin it and turn it into a dubious badge of honor.  I mention all this not because I carry any grudge or offense against this forgettable character, but because it happens to be the last time anyone brought up anything about mathematics to me away from school that went beyond simple arithmetical problems.  And since I did not become a mathematics teacher, engineer or scientist, I have never professionally used anything I have ever learned in this field beyond early elementary school, although in college I studied calculus, differential equations, probability and statistics, and linear algebra. Yet within the academic corridors mathematics reigns supreme, although it's not exactly a conversational icebreaker.  In fact, I find bringing up mathematics in conversation with anyone extremely awkward and random...after all, mathematics is the antithesis of ego: it exists on its own terms and cares not whether folks like it, understand it, or even find it interesting.  But I think I'm going to experiment around a bit and see whether or not I can get people to open up about how they feel about mathematics, and even delve lightly into its contents if that's possible.  My initial results seem to indicate that people are a lot more interested in talking about how math made them feel and affected their lives than discussing it on its own terms...