[zerobees]

Outside of some niche specializations like cryptography, math isn't practiced because of "consequences". Most mathematicians take pride in their work not having any obvious practical applications. They're also overwhelmingly working in university settings where they're not expected to generate revenue or deliver practical results.

We basically subsidize the practice of mathematics as an art form, and if you try to take the artistry away, you might find that the artists don't want to play along. And I guess you can imagine future robo-math production lines without any human involvement, and then LLMs finding applications for the resulting theorems, but it's not possible today.

[chermi]

Most mathematicians don't take pride in their results having no applications. That's just not true. Maybe some quirky pure logicians or something. But otherwise 90%+* of mathematicians I know would be at least satisfied if not thrilled for their work to be used by others.

*Completely made up statistic.

[setopt]

Are you sure that’s «most» mathematicians?

At the universities I’ve been to (as a student and now faculty), «applied mathematics» and «statistics» have been the two largest divisions. But perhaps that’s a bias from engineering-heavy universities?

[jubilanti]

"Applied Math" and "Statistics" are distinct fields from "Mathematics," not subfields of it. People in those two departments are often closer to Computer Science or the statistics subfield in a domain science field (e.g. biostatistics, econometrics) than to Mathematics in terms of what they actually teach and research.

[bigmadshoe]

You put it perfectly. And all these AI math startups don't actually care about mathematics. They are just using it as a proxy for general reasoning, with the VC pitch being some kind of world domination after they crack these problems.