I am writing an essay for a scholarship and they asked the following question: "How will these goals enable you to help others?"
Although I am majoring in pure math, this really got me to think about the applications of pure math. I know that when Ramanujan discovered the Mock Theta functions, he predicted that they would play a vital role in the future. And decades later, they did! A better example might be of G.H. Hardy, who boasted that his work in Number Theory was useless and not applicable in the real world. Well, we know how that went.
So my question to the community is, do all mathematical ideas eventually find their way into the real world? I realize this is a broad question, but I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on it. I hope questions such as this are allowed on the site!
I think the Logical answer in No (If we consider that the world is gonna to end someday)
Because you can create something not useful just before world ends!
But this answer is not practical at all!
By the way, I look at mathematics just as I look at Painting, Music, and other arts. Are they useful? I do not think so.
But they are beautiful and it is an application itself. It applies to enjoy you and what application could be better than it?
But I'm not suggesting to say this for get scholarship because it won't work. You can try to find some way to justify that your works will be applicable or spends time without money but with beauty of ART.