My question is if people are so good at math why are they doing machine learning, especially in practice? Some very good people investigating it theoretically.

My question is if people are so good at math why are they doing machine learning, especially in practice? Some very good people investigating it theoretically. But the best young math professors that I’m personally friends with actually do have something of the “elitist math attitude” and will tell me things like they think the ML field belongs in the 1600s while they successfully work in their obscure area of algebra applied to mathematical physics or something