I also never enjoyed higher mathematics, but practical maths came easy. Good thing, too, because after my military career got shortened I relied on that in my engineering career, something I would have never believed I would have had any talent for, maths and sciences in the school environment were loathsome.
I believe the "maths ceiling" I hit was very simply the tipping point between processes that were intuitive and those that one applied almost as a matter of faith; the difference between maths as a tool used in other fields and mathematics as a religion onto itself.
Rally navigation lead to land nav and mapwork in the infantry, something I was very comfortable with which lead to my being thought to be useful in more "esoteric" parts of the profession. I was always comfortable with a map and compass in my hands.
Ship nav without LORAN (LORAN-C was being implemented in my day) or no doubt GPS today was actually pretty interesting. I did a little long range nav; chronos, sextant, charts, and "the book", but always compared to the electronic systems (old-school master who believed we should know that stuff in case the electrical systems went down). Coastal nav wasn't bad; channels and stacked-lights, shooting azimuths to shore features and plotting intersections of the back azimuths, that sort of thing.
Nav by air was something I didn't do much of other than simple terrain association and bearing.
I always was fascinated by maps, starting with those big cloth bastards that hung off the chalkboard at school (weren't they beautiful colourful things?), and rally nav started my interest in just solving the problem, which I found satisfying. I like math when it has a real practical use as a tool, but glaze over very quickly when it becomes a field of study onto itself.
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