Earlier quoted context omitted.
But sometimes the connection between "beautiful art project" and "practical tools" is totally unexpected. We often invest time in projects that seem simply like "beautiful art", and then much later stumble upon something practical. I think a great example of this is cryptography. The foundations of it come from number theory (prime numbers, modular arithmetic, elliptic curves), but the subject of number theory, befor…
That's a popular meme but its mostly false. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/4kt/the_value_of_theoretical_researc... The vast majority of "useless" mathematics really do turn out to be useless. In the rare exceptions, there's not much evidence that doing the work beforehand is actually an advantage. E.g. Einstein wasn't aware of most of the work on non-Euclidian geometry before developing relativity IIRC. Stuff like prime…
Consider this: a vast majority of mutations are useless, but for this reason, if there were no mutations at all, and mutations somehow willed themselves out of existence, then there would only be primitive lifeforms on earth.