TITLE: Besides proving new theorems, how can a person contribute to mathematics?
QUESTION [79 upvotes]: There are at least a few things a person can do to contribute to the mathematics community without necessarily obtaining novel results, for example:

Organizing known results into a coherent narrative in the form of lecture notes or a textbook
Contributing code to open-source mathematical software

What are some other ways to make auxiliary contributions to mathematics?

REPLY [2 votes]: Many problems of theoretical physics (e.g., string theory) are related to the development of some new math. This severely requires the services of able mathematicians. In the past, Riemann, Grassman, Hilbert, Poincare, Elie Cartan, deed so for the discovery of Einstein's equation in GR. Physicist Witten was awarded Field Award for his services in Math research.