Surely you must admit that you were a miserable excuse for a student, Holmes. You gave your schoolwork no more than the most cursory attention, and while you had a quick and analytical mind that was ideally predisposed to mathematical reasoning, your mastery of even the lowest of the higher maths was abysmal. Your only interests were boxing, sword-fighting, and violin-playing, and in none of these areas was your interest quite enough to drive you to hone your skin to professional quality.
You absolutely refused to learn the calculus. "Can I carry an infinite number of pounds on me?" you asked of me. "Can I walk an infinite number of yards or live for an infinite number of years? The infinite appears nowhere in nature, and as thus the practical mind, dealing in what is real and thus finite, has no need of it. You tell me that if I cut a circle into an infinite number of pieces I can rearrange them so as to form a rectangle. I see the evident usefulness of such a piece of information in that it shall allow me to measure a circle should I need to do so, but why on earth should I need to know how or why this should be so?"
I shared my frustration with my colleague, Rutherford, a much-respected and learned man of science. "Aye, that's a Holmes for you," he responded. "They're a lazy sort. I taught his brother Mycroft, and it was the same story. Smartest lad I've ever known, but he lacked the ambition to put it to any use. I hear he has some petty clerkship in government now; he's not fit to be anything but a bureaucrat. I wouldn't be surprised if this Sherlock were the same story. A waste, I tell you, a real waste."
I was not going to let your singular mind go to waste. I argued and I fought, I prodded, I tried to demonstrate to you the beauty of mathematics, of a perfect world perfectly ordered, controlled by pure reason, mechanical and predictable.
Every word fell on deaf ears.