>>10955151lol, the hate for theoreticians comes mostly from the inability of laymen (not even applied scientists and mathematicians) to understand the motivation for such research. Sure many undergrads jerk themselves off to purity, but even theoreticians boast usefulness in their work to understand deep questions in the theory at large. Only when we do that can the theory be synthesized into applied science - hell, many of those same theorists find applications for their work. TCS is a field that extends mostly to solving abstract questions in pure math, but the result is that most are motivated by real concerns or fundamental limits to what we can figure out, period. Algebraic geometry is one of the few leads we have on P vs. NP right now. So being in a "pure" field is more about perspective and less about an identity
>>10956390But it's true though. Number theory became incredibly important as cryptography became increasingly dependent on computational complexity. Abstract classes like NP-complete are ideal for that field because it's describes problems hard to solve but easy to verify being solved. Analytic number theory is important for CS as well. All of this, combinatorics, graph theory, etc., which was all once "jerking off" to pure structures have their foot steeped in solving tangible, real world problems that show up
