The author has a PhD in math. And I thought the article was very good, actually. Many pure mathematicians don't care at all about applications, but the problems are just interesting in and of themselves. Take the twin primes conjecture for example, which recently got a lot of coverage as weaker forms of the conjecture were proved. Why does something like that matter at all? It doesn't. Maybe it will eventually have some sort of cryptographic application years from now, but probably not, and the people who are working on it certainly aren't motivated by that.
So pure mathematician's aren't making tools purposefully. They're playing around with ideas just for the fun of it.