I sometimes like to believe that our minds are often creative enough to find mathematical patterns in nature, consciously or non-purposefully. It may very well be the reason the likes of Aristotle and Isaac Newton were able to see these, in what I would presume to be through philosophy (study of nature). However, in Aristotle and Newton's cases, they were much more than just creative; unlike most people even in our generation, they were able to create general laws governed by symbols we are able to understand up until now. Their creations were untimely.

To some extent, perhaps schools recognized this, so they incorporated systems of teaching mathematics to students in schools, so they can use mathematics to operationalize their thoughts. What they did wrong was that they focused so much on time and effort into teaching these methods and concepts that they forgot that without the creativity of the mind, the things they teach are useless.

Most students see no reason in learning abstract mathematics like factorization or, I'll repeat again, the quadratic equation because they weren't able to grasp its creative background.

In conclusion, educational societies created systems of learning to quantify, or to use your terms, "operationalize" mathematics in order to construct deeper meanings to their creativity. However, by doing so, they stripped away people's creativity by giving mathematics a boring and dull appearance. People who enjoy math are those with minds creative enough to spark meaning behind symbols.

Thank you for your comments, I learn a lot from them. I truly appreciate it!