But it is. M.C. Escher, who made some pretty awesome pieces of art, once said "Although I am absolutely without training or knowledge, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than my fellow artists" (according to the writeup by the gazelle). Stephen Baxter, an awesome science fiction writer, wrote in "Manifold: time":
In a way Michael's soul is the essence of the mathematician's.
I know what he is feeling. I remember how strange it was when I realized that if I became a mathematician I could spend my life in pursuit of a kind of mystical experience few of my fellow humans could ever share.
Mystical? Certainly. Data can serve only as a guide in the deepest intellectual endeavors. We are led more by a sense of aesthetics, as we manufacture our beautiful mathematical structures. We believe that the most elegant and simple structures are probably the ones that hold the greatest truth. That is why we seek unified theories - ideas that underpin and unite other notions - in mathematics as well as physics.
We're artists, we mathematicians, we physicists.
Reproduced without permission, but I hope he'll forgive me.
I was somewhat shocked when I realised, attending university, that there were trends and fashions even within such fields of study as mathematics and computer science. I thought the pure sciences would be above such things. But, people exercise their intellects, imaginations and intelligence - because it's fun! It feels good. You can't seperate a field of study from the individuals studying it - if there were no-one studying it, it wouldn't be a field of study. It was actually my passion for the sciences that led me to accept its sometimes fickle fashionable nature.