I'm surprised to see a lot of resistance to your post here on Hacker News. I'm not a mathematician by trade, but I was involved fairly deeply in that world as a

I'm surprised to see a lot of resistance to your post here on Hacker News. I'm not a mathematician by trade, but I was involved fairly deeply in that world as an undergraduate and I certainly feel that many mathematicians would agree that mathematics is an end in and of itself. Hardy was actually quite adamant about favoring those areas that are least likely to yield real world applications (though as we know from history this back-fired on him quite spectacularly, through no fault of his own). Most mathematicians that I know or knew contributed to the world and fulfilled that part of them through the rest of their duties as a professor. That means teaching, mentoring, and helping to run an academic department which trains mostly young students who will not be researchers in pure mathematics but rather engineers and so on. It means helping teach a new generation how to think rigorously and energetically and passionately. These are clear (and incredibly important) real-world contributions which are at the same time tangential to the professor's research.