EDIT: FFS why does this subject always get people frothing at the mouth before they even read the main point stated, only to go on and accidentally agree with it eventually? Pls read first before getting mad at stuff that I explicitly argued against.
EDIT 2: OK apparently there's still miscommunication, and I think the 1st edit somehow made it worse. When I say "useful" I put it in scare quotes on purpose and as I clarify in the 1st, 4th and 5th paragraps, it is NOT about value but about practical/technological utility.
I originally posted this on R*ddit to an audience of math nerds (so be warned that it is written with reddit STEMlords in mind) because there was a relevant convo going on and it would be fun to also have it here.
Sure, there is a lot of modern math that is practically useful, but the majority of pure math really isn't "useful' in any way, shape or form for now, and probably won't be any time soon, possibly forever. Like, even areas which are apparently "useful", like computer science, is full of things that have absolutely 0 practical utility and are solely of academic interest. Whether P does or doesn't equal NP doesn't really matter to anyone doing practical work. People wouldn't get upset about their discipline getting slighted or whatever if this stupid idea that scientific research should have "practical application" (which generally means "someone can sell it for money") hadn't proliferated, starting from schools.
Even when someone finds an "application" through some kind of far fetched (or not so far fetched) reasoning, it's some application to, like, highly theoretical physics that may or may not actually have something to do with the real world, and even if it does, it is only relevant in extremely niche experimental circumstances to the extent that it can't ever conceivably lead to technological progress. And even IF it does, sometimes it's just progress relevant only to more research about more stuff without application.
So even then you have to resort to saying something like "the result is not useful but maybe one of the methods used to prove it can be used for something else", and then that something else turns out to also not be useful but again "maybe one of the methods used to find that something else is useful for another something else and that other something else is useful for another other something else and then that other other something else has a practical application that is only relevant to research, but then maybe that relates to some other other other...", etc and it gets kind of silly. That or someone says something abstract like "it's useless now but it may be useful some time!". Maybe. Or maybe not.
In the end of the day the same arguments could be used to justify anything being useful via some contrived butterfly effect style conjecture. This of course is usually done because otherwise people can't get grant money otherwise, governments demand that research will produce results they can use to blow up people or sell stuff. Also the result of a bad educational system that emphasizes this kind of "usefulness", which therefore renders it unable to convince students that something is worth learning unless it is "useful". Of course "why should I learn this if it's not useful to me" is a very valid concern of students, but the problem is somewhere else. First, schools DON'T really teach any of the stuff that is useful and interesting to most people. If they did, then math would get a lot less attacks on that front. Schools teach with 30% of the students in mind, the ones who will really apply the things they learned. The other 70% can just go to prison or whatever as far as the educational system is concerned. Second, schools are very boring and antagonistic towards kids and since kids are miserable learning stuff, they need extra justification to learn them. Third, the schools themselves teach kids to think like that so it's no surprise that they do. Fourth, school math mostly sucks and is super boring for most people.
So yes, most modern pure math is indeed "useless". That is not the issue. The issue is, why does this matter? Why is it bad? Should it be bad? I don't think so. It's a false idea that gets perpetuated at many levels starting from school. But then there is the issue of mathematics being very exclusionary and distant from most people, which makes it harder for them to care, which brings us to the issue of outreach but whatever, that's a different matter.
Lots of nerds in this comment section who don't seem to understand that most people don't nee d to know whether P=NP. I have no fucking clue what P=NP is, and I don't want to know, because I don't need to know complex maths to understand humanities. Mandatory maths education should include basic arithmetic and algebra, statistics, probability and financial maths, and maybe sequences and series. Like, I want to study history and politics. Why do I have to learn to solve the equation of a line X^2 + 6X + 9? Why do I need to know about numbers that cannot exist, like i? Why do I need all of this abstract shit?
Obviously I understand that complex maths is very important for scientific stuff, and people working in STEM will need them, but maybe just don't teach them to people who don't want to do STEM?
Idk, maybe other countries have it differently, but where I live I have to learn the most arbitrary stuff, and its treated as if its way more important than stuff like history, geography, politics, music, art, languages etc
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I don't really think that's useful either though. Like, most people that go through most Western schooling systems won't understand either of those points either. Physics isn't a mandatory science class and is probably the least taught STEM field. And even then, you can cover all of the practical aspects of the field with algebra and a bit of trig. There's shockingly little that anyone needs to retain to function in society, and kids seem to generally know that. The average American adult seems to know how to read, write, and do just enough arithmetic to pay a credit card and do their taxes mostly right. They seem to acquire desperation and rudimentary Microsoft Office skills in college. We can all get together and have a nice struggle sesh over what ought to be taught in a just system of education, but as Leftists we should all be willing to recognize that the Western school system exists mostly to reproduce the means of and social justification for the stratification of the classes. That it teaches future technical workers some foundational skills that they'll finish developing in college is more of a byproduct than the focus.
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This is a basic skill that you'd need if you ever see a graph that bends
I highly disagree. solving equations is a basic mathematical skill and should be taught to ALL people. Of course there are criticisms to be made about how the schooling system works, but the fact that people learn basic mathematics isn't the issue here.