To me, that makes your conjecture very unlikely to be true...
What's the payoff here?
I would rather someone of the intellectual calibre you describe work on problems more relevant to improving the world.
Pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake always results in improvement down the line, even if it's impossible to predict when and how.
Do you think Benjamin Franklin expected a payoff from the experiments that led to the discovery of electricity? Or Newton researching gravity? Much of our knowledge about the universe comes from researchers picking at a topic just for the hell of it.
> I would rather someone of the intellectual calibre you describe work on problems more relevant to improving the world.
Impressive amount of entitlement here. Nobody owes you anything, and people are free to do anything they want. Not everyone wants to be a hero or great inventor, even if they have the skill for it. Nor is it some universal moral obligation for skilled people to spend their lives producing something profitable or beneficial to society.
Do you have hobbies? If so, you should feel bad because you're wasting your talents on useless unprofitable activities. Better go out and solve the world's problems.
G.H. Hardy was a British mathematician who expressed pride in the "uselessness" of his work, believing that pure mathematics was an art form that should not be tainted by practical applications. Ironically, his contributions to analytic number theory now underpins modern cryptography.
It’s weirdly difficult to study something for years - no matter how abstract — and successfully avoid any practical applications!
This reeks of survivor bias and I'm interested to hear arguments why you're so confidence this is the case without resorting to the obviously very well-known survivors (as opposed to the thousands of research projects that ended apparently nowhere and long forgotten...)
Personal happiness? It's also more than short-sighted to assume that just because there is no immediately obvious overall benefit, that no such thing exists.
The techniques and insights developed and found during the pursuit of such fundamental and elusive problems can have profound side effects that may materialize only decades or even centuries later.
Why is it a smart person should be expected to use their capabilities for "the betterment of humanity"? There's a level of entitlement that goes with statements like that.
also the modern complex plane definition is not from Cardano.