> 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

> 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".