By the way, am I ignorant of modern mathematics? I love the thrill of a good puzzle, but I'd say a lot of solving these kinds of intellectual challenges is most

By the way, am I ignorant of modern mathematics? I love the thrill of a good puzzle, but I'd say a lot of solving these kinds of intellectual challenges is mostly for the mental thrill, rather than advancing humanity. It's self-serving. That's how I view modern math. There's the occassional discovery, like Linear Algebra, or the Fourier Transform which has basically allowed math to improve civilization to such a degree, that they deserve to be counted among the most important works of civilization. Yet the best these weird math theories usually provide is proving something is fundamentally hard to compute, or distributed in some peculiar way, or maybe knock down some of those aforementioned problems into easier tiers. This all ends up practically in cryptography. Hashes, symmetric asymmetric crypto, zero knowledge proofs etc. etc. These are well and useful, but not that useful and the new ones often end up functionally identical to the old, from an utilitarian point of view.