Agreed and that's not the point about mathematics. The point was about ascertaining the impact of a mathematical breakthrough .. which is harder than a scientif

Agreed and that's not the point about mathematics. The point was about ascertaining the impact of a mathematical breakthrough .. which is harder than a scientific one, because the idea of what is a "breakthrough" is usually defined within the domain of mathematics itself. A good example is all the number theoretic work, elliptic curves etc. which underpin much of secure communication today, but started off as "pure" in the sense of "won't find applications". That was easy. Now what's the impact of the breakthrough proof of Fermat's last theorem by Wiles?