[eddsh1994]

I'm not saying Math is useless, I'm saying there must be tiers for topics in how useful they are such that someone can say "Hey, that's pointless!" and one can't follow with "Therefore all things are pointless". Or, that allow me to rank niche topics in their usefulness.

Irrigation is very important. Now, is Irrigation Maths more important to us as a species than Terrence Taos work on spontaneously combusting water? Probably! Would it be more useful to have PhDs be funded in optimizing food routes between countries after climate change over game theory applications for blackjack? Probably!

[TheRealPomax]

Unfortunately, no. Maths is so vast that what might seem a trivial and silly brain teaser can turn out to unlock a massive problem in a seemingly completely unrelated subfield of mathematics, and we won't know until someone discovers that link.

What someone might call "a silly little brain teaser" today could actually result in a breakthrough paper weeks (or centuries) from now in a different subfield because someone far smarter than us realized that part of the problem they were working was actually analogous to a number theory related problem that was simplified, even a tiny bit, by this solution. (Hell, Nash built his entire career on spotting those kind of links and then telling other mathematicians to focus on working out the individual pieces)

Maths plays out over "we don't even know how long or short" time scales. What's the use? We don't know, it's probably completely useless. Until someone suddenly realizes that it's not.

[msm_]

>Now, is Irrigation Maths more important to us as a species than Terrence Taos work on spontaneously combusting water? Probably! Would it be more useful to have PhDs be funded in optimizing food routes between countries after climate change over game theory applications for blackjack? Probably!

I imagine you would be equally annoyed at Euler in 1736 when he was wasting his time with bridge brain teasers (and invented graph theory in the process) instead of solving bubonic plague or optimizing irrigation. Science just doesn't (in general) work the way you propose.

[eddsh1994]

And the majority of science sit in empty libraries with maybe a single citation by a postdoc trying to write enough papers to get the next postdoc...

[TheRealPomax]

Sounds like you forgot that's literally everything niche until a post doc or tenured mathematician goes "yo hold up. This tiny proof (helps) solve(s) X". And now their name's in the science history books.