> It feels a bit similar to how Conway's Game of Life is a surprisingly deep rabbit hole with its own devoted niche community. I wonder how many of those types

> It feels a bit similar to how Conway's Game of Life is a surprisingly deep rabbit hole with its own devoted niche community. I wonder how many of those types of math/programming niches exist. I'm not a programmer, though I suspect that that community is similar, except perhaps with fewer rabbit holes now just because it's younger—but research-level mathematics is essentially nothing but one after another rabbit hole with a devoted niche community. There's no topic so specialized that you can't find a mathematician for whom it's their everyday concrete research lab, and no mathematician so specialized that you can't find a topic even in their discipline on which they'll look down as meaninglessly abstract and application-free.