I used to have problems with math in early elementary school.  Arithmetic, really, because it seemed sort of arbitrary.

Once I started to see patterns in it, though, once we learned sets and logic and stuff, I was way into it.  I didn't really learn my times tables until Algebra when I was on fire to understand it and I realized I had to know them to play this fascinating new game.

So it's especially annoying when someone "explains" math to me that I not only already understand, but understand better than they do.  Not surprisingly, it's usually men who do this.

This has happened at work a couple of times recently. 

The first example is someone trying to use statistics to prove something that the statistics didn't prove at all.  When I questioned his underlying assumption he assured me he was really good with Excel and if I wanted he could help explain his spreadsheet.  No, asshole, actually the problem is your baseline assumptions which are driving your interpretation.

The second actually came in two parts.  Part one was where someone I worked with was trying to figure out a code, basically where a number in a vendor's database represents a real value we can look up, but it's not a simple translation.  He spent weeks on this, literally, just retrying an assumption that clearly failed — that the association between the two is was a simple y = mx + b relationship. 

Looking at the data (in Excel) made it obvious this wasn't true, but he just kept trying different values for m and b hoping it would work.  When I asked to see the data he "patiently" explained that it was "complicated' and that he had talked to several other people we work with who are DBAs!  and they didn't have an answer yet!  But they were "close."  So not to worry about it.

He left the company and I looked at his test data, finally, and within half an hour I had an equation to do the conversion.  Looking at his emails back and forth with the DBAs, it is obvious none of them had any idea what to do if they couldn't just plug it into a formula they already knew.

Oh, and part two?  When he left the company, he wanted some data sent to him.  But didn't want me to do it because he didn't think I could write data to a disk.