He skips over understanding our world which is probably the reason most pure maths is done.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I suppose it could be that we have different defintions of what "our world" means.
You might like the quote below. I suspect you're arguing that most pure math is performed for option #2 below (utilitarian purposes). Like I said, I'm not so sure.
In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were [someone to] drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him.
I guess I was including maths and imagine mathematicians investigate stuff of the general type like the riemann hypothesis, whether all non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function lie on the critical line where the real part equals 1/2, which are interesting but of little practical value.
Comments
I'm not sure I agree with this. I suppose it could be that we have different defintions of what "our world" means.
You might like the quote below. I suspect you're arguing that most pure math is performed for option #2 below (utilitarian purposes). Like I said, I'm not so sure.
In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were [someone to] drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him.
I guess I was including maths and imagine mathematicians investigate stuff of the general type like the riemann hypothesis, whether all non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function lie on the critical line where the real part equals 1/2, which are interesting but of little practical value.
The full text is here. It's a speech by Einstein on Max Plank's 60th birthday. https://www.site.uottawa.ca/~yymao/misc/Einstein_PlanckBirth...