Comment by moffkalast
3 hours ago
Well at the end of the day, the point of trying to understand the universe is to achieve specific goals leveraging that understanding.
It seems to me that all of these hundreds of proofs we've seen recently are glorified academic exercises, whose purpose is curiosity for its own sake without any practical application, or we'd already hear about at least one of them being implemented to some gain somewhere. It's all woefully unimpressive. It's not like anything stops mathematicians from trying to find more elegant solutions to their machine solved pet problems, since that's what they were going to try and do anyway despite it being completely pointless in practice.
> Well at the end of the day, the point of trying to understand the universe is to achieve specific goals leveraging that understanding.
Nope.
Maybe not for you, but voters arent giving taxpayer money to mathematicians for any reason other than hopefully leveraging the understanding mathematicians create to materially advance society. The people who are just interested in understanding can do it as a hobby
It can still be a good long term investment for society even if individual researchers are primarily motivated more by understanding than application. Arguably it’s the best approach we have because reliably predicting which ideas will be fruitful is super hard
"How and whether specific mathematics might lead to improving the world (whatever that means) is usually impossible to tease out, but mathematics collectively is extremely important."
(https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici...)