[jiggawatts]

Category Theory was called abstract nonsense by theoretical mathematicians, but it has helped improve type theory for computer language design.

G.H. Hardy was a British mathematician who expressed pride in the "uselessness" of his work, believing that pure mathematics was an art form that should not be tainted by practical applications. Ironically, his contributions to analytic number theory now underpins modern cryptography.

It’s weirdly difficult to study something for years - no matter how abstract — and successfully avoid any practical applications!

[hnfong]

> It’s weirdly difficult to study something for years - no matter how abstract — and successfully avoid any practical applications!

This reeks of survivor bias and I'm interested to hear arguments why you're so confidence this is the case without resorting to the obviously very well-known survivors (as opposed to the thousands of research projects that ended apparently nowhere and long forgotten...)

[pathsjs]

I am not aware of any result of Hardy with applications to cryptography, but I'd be curious to be found wrong

[jiggawatts]

He made significant contributions to the theory of elliptic curves.