TITLE: value of work in mathematics
QUESTION [8 upvotes]: If you're working in a field of mathematics that is not driven by real world problems (or the abstraction of real world problems), then how do you gauge the value of your work? How do you decide what is important to work on? Is it purely on a whim?

REPLY [3 votes]: Time has shown that in returns of their endeavor, mathematicians (not necessarily individually but collectively) will be considered worthy of honor and recognition, somehow more profoundly than the intellectuals of other enterprises, like who would beat Libnitz in the impact of his ideas and contribution to the humanity, given that he sowed the seeds of computer and so much more to come in engineering. But, at the desk of a modern philosopher-mathematician, the true goal of the modern mathematics, is closer to its platonic views more than ever, where the emphasis and pay off is in Beauty. Nietzsche would have said that, mathematics is humanistic, alas all too humanistic.