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Why are we not all downvoting anti-intellectualist comments like this? The odds that a whole discipline of mathematics is "of little use" or "nothing more than

• thfuran 4y ago
  Why? For a lot of mathematicians, work being of practical use isn't even a consideration. I know math professors who would freely tell you that they were never aware of any application for their PhD work and never cared, because it was interesting. A lot of math does have a lot of useful applications, and there certainly are applied mathematicians, but it is not, on the face of it, absurd to suppose that there are areas of math with little to no known practical application.
  • epgui 4y ago
    > I know math professors who would freely tell you that they were never aware of any application for their PhD work and never cared, because it was interesting Exactly, but that's the opposite of an anti-intellectual attitude. It's not anti-intellectual to engage with pure maths-- on the contrary lol! What's anti-intellectual is to say that if you can't see the value of maths, that it's not worth engaging with. You'll never see the value of anything if you don't engage with it, and also I'm pretty sure that by now people shouldn't need any convincing that maths is worth learning. And when I say "engage with maths" I don't mean "I read an article or a book once but I didn't get it so I decided that it wasn't worth the time".
• timmg 4y ago
  Sorry if I offended your sensibilities. Feel free to downvote my comment if you don’t think it adds to the conversation. I would appreciate, though, if you didn’t misquote my comment when replying to it. Neither of the things you have quoted are things I wrote. Worse, they are a misrepresentation of my comment.