>>11368266Applied mathematics and number theory are the only reasons to pursue mathematics. Mathematics went downhill when it became overly abstract. Hell, most of abstract algebra was initially developed to solve problems in number theory like FLT. Most of modern analysis was developed to solve problems in physics. The development of complex analysis in the 19th century was almost entirely due to mathematicians desire to understand the pendulum. When mathematicians lost sight of the motivating problems that led to increasingly abstract mathematics they couldn't see the forest for the trees. I encourage all pure mathematicians to go back to the well and think about real-world problems in physics and number theory (I consider the integers to be a "real world" of sorts on its own).
