11/07/2022
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Pure mathematics has had a huge impact on your daily life!
For example, you used the internet to post this. The internet uses various security protocols which encrypt /decrypt data. Among the mathematical tools employed are number theory, abstract algebra, and theoretical computer science (which grew out of mathematics).
Many years ago, number theory was considered one of the purest fields of mathematics, and one of the most useless. It is now one of the largest areas of mathematics which affects our daily lives. And in an enormous way, too. The internet could not exist in its present form without number theory.
In general, you can think of a mathematician as a special kind of linguist. (It is philosophical convention, I believe, to assume that mathematicians study things in the sense that we say that the number 1 actually exists. Regardless, whether mathematicians study something which already exists or whether they develop it themselves is beside the point.) Mathematicians develop (or discover) the mathematical language. These developments will likely later on be used to express and solve problems in the real world. At least, that's the hope. We can't know what problems we will need to solve in the future. For example, who knew how much differential geometry would contribute to physics so much, particularly in being the foundation on which Einstein built his theories of special and general relativity? Having mathematical tools developed beforehand is quite a perk!
