There is also another great thing that can dispense knowledge, the same that inspired both classics and mathematics: real life. You mention Taleb, so you must be a bit familiar with Mandelbrot work. Well he observed reality carefully, free of prejudices, skeptically, and took it for what it is. Then built math on top of it. Sometimes going outside of recombining ideas and taking new ones from reality itself can be good. That said, I come from the opposite experience, having read my share of classics and recently discovering math (I was also taught it but always approached as yet another thing to study, not as a tool to model reality).