I called the math department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to find out the proper way to count and whether zero is a real number. Apparently, counting is not MIT's forte. I was told that no one in the math department would comment on that topic. Teresi, writing in the Atlantic Monthly about his attempt to establish whether it is proper to count starting from zero. R. Nicely, on the attention he received in 1994 after finding a flaw in the Intel Pentium.
Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied.
For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics. On the contrary, if anything, a good education should lead to a permanent dissatisfaction. Complacency is the very opposite of the intellectual life. The dirty secret is that first rate work requires an enormous amount of effort, anxiety and even desperation. You know, I don't think math is a science, I think it's a religion.