>>12880895As far back as ancient Egypt there was a division between "pure" and "applied" math. Land markers were washed away due to the regular flooding, and they had pretty strict property regulations/laws so it was very important to them to be able to measure land and angles accurately. The priest/scholar class engaged with math for its own sake, however.
If you want to read more about this I recommend you check out Newmann's World of Mathematics. There are a lot of cool stories about history in there, a lot of information that you might not find just searching on google
