This won't be popular [1], but research breakthroughs in theoretical mathematics seem to be often useless in a way that useless science is not. Scientific breakthroughs are also often useless (nothing practical is gained from the first detection of a gravitational wave, or from finding out how flight first evolved in insects) but scientific insights still have more information content: they tell us facts specifically about our world, while mathematical proofs merely tell us about all possible worlds. About some consequence of made-up assumptions we happen to find interesting.
It's a bit like finding the fastest way possible to beat Super Mario Bros 3 while collecting the minimum number of coins. A solution to a neat puzzle, but it doesn't carry the epistemic weight of finding out how the universe works, even if both pieces of knowledge are equally useless.
1: And of course this point doesn't apply to applied math.
dw, you're not alone in this. Researchers like this are extremely impressive, but it seems like an absolutely massive misallocation of his brainpower. Sure, people can say the same about art/literature/chess/etc., but I would argue that more people benefit from viewing or experiencing the latter than will benefit from working through all 119 pages of this paper. This guy could be doing medical or other scientific research, but instead is working on some contrived problem. Even here, let's assume there is some remote application for a nanobot for targeted drug delivery transiting a capillary... "rough" computational solutions will be more than adequate, especially when taking into account wall elasticity and other variables. I do wonder why some of the top institutions in the world like KIAS are even funding this.
I agree with you. I would rather this brain power go to modeling genetics, politics, and evolution. Fake problems like the sofa problem are overcelebrated while important issues like theory of eugenics are villified and undercelebrated.
It's a bit like finding the fastest way possible to beat Super Mario Bros 3 while collecting the minimum number of coins. A solution to a neat puzzle, but it doesn't carry the epistemic weight of finding out how the universe works, even if both pieces of knowledge are equally useless.
1: And of course this point doesn't apply to applied math.