Comment by nilkn

It's not survivorship bias, because math isn't a bunch of independent, parallel things, where one turned out to be useful and the rest was junk. There is no known way to advance only the portions of math that, centuries later, will turn out to be economically useful. Even with AI, we only know how to advance the entire subject.

You're effectively asking to predict the future hundreds of years in advance. Nobody and nothing can do that. With math, as with all science, you must be willing to accept that not everything will be a hit. There will be misses, and often the same person will generate both hits and misses, because it's fundamentally unpredictable what remains a miss and what doesn't over centuries. The best demonstration of this is that your own thinking here would've banned the invention of calculus: it didn't materially affect daily life for a solid century.