Understanding mathematics before we understand what problems it solves happens all the time. Maybe nothing will come of this, but because we can't know that, it

Understanding mathematics before we understand what problems it solves happens all the time. Maybe nothing will come of this, but because we can't know that, it's worth researching. People didn't believe there was non-Euclidean geometry and not long after the taboo was broken, we had General Relativity. Einstein was a genius, but he did not invent the math for GR. Mathematicians like Riemann, Minkowski, Hilbert, Ricci, Levi-Civita and others created the mathematics for it first. Finding the area under a curve or the tangent line of an arbitrary curve were considered two unconnected brain teasers until Calculus was invented by Newton and Leibniz and applied to gravity by Newton. The "Math First" approach has done more than enough to prove its continued viability and without it you wouldn't have been able to type that here.