> OP mentions “wondering, playing, amusing yourself with your imagination.” Hell, build something. Mathematics is like AI. As soon as a company/whoever builds

> OP mentions “wondering, playing, amusing yourself with your imagination.” Hell, build something. Mathematics is like AI. As soon as a company/whoever builds upon one of the advances in the field and people en masse start using a practical result that comes out of it, it stops being called mathematics/AI. When we hear the word "mathematician" we almost right away imagine an absent-minded professor not contributing anything immediately useful to the real world. People are basically arguing about language, not realizing that they are pawns of a subtle phenomenon that the name of a discipline taught in school refers not so much to knowledge based on and derived from that discipline in the world at large, but to the actual act of teaching that discipline to children and young adults, and sometimes to performing academic-model-funded (meaning charity-like funded) research. It's a bit sad because this trick the language plays on us probably devalues in the eyes of young people something that is actually a useful/practical skill. Kids may say to themselves, "Why do I need this? I don't want to be a schoolteacher," and they will be both right and wrong at the same time, not realizing how many high-paying jobs from engineering to banks to Wall Street require the mental skill they chose not to spend time developing.