With all due respect, you were a victim of bad math teachers. On the other hand Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and all, had good New Math teachers. The New Math fueled our digital revolution. But asking run of the mill public school math teachers to teach it was like asking a gas station mechanic to fix a flying saucer.
Sorry Bill Gates et al are my age and so probably had standard math instruction - geometry, algebra, trig, calc, def-eq, Linear algebra, and vectors and maybe numerical analysis. I had to take my daughter out of public school, because all they were teaching her was how to operate a calculator - they had a whole book on what buttons to push, no understanding, no reasoning. After just two years of classical instruction she is excelling at VA Tech.
>> I was a victim of New Math, and have never fully recovered.
> With all due respect, you were a victim of bad math teachers.
Screw the "due respect."
"Due respect" is for a bright kid who was stuck in a school in Arkansas.
My school and its teachers--math and otherwise--were superior to most. New math, however, was for kids with an aptitude for the subject. The *only* reason I wasted four years in AP math was for the ol' college record. My own intelligence and creativity lie elsewhere.
Obviously :)