Comment by saberience

None of these graph theory results lead to any applications in the real world.

But sure, let me know when they do. I'll be waiting.

I'm not sure how you define "knowing how the world works", but knowing that a very very niche algorithm upper bounds that we thought was x^100 and now we now it's x^99, isn't that interesting. It doesn't really tell us much more about the world and it doesn't have any applications for our day to day lives.