I'd be interested to know if this proof has any practical implications or uses.
EVERYTHING matters...
Dr. Morgan said the excitement came not from the final proof of the conjecture, which everybody felt was true, but the method, “finding deep connections between what were unrelated fields of mathematics.”
--snip--
In the early 1980’s Richard Hamilton of Columbia suggested a new technique, called the Ricci flow, borrowed from the kind of mathematics that underlies Einstein’s general theory of relativity and string theory, to investigate the shapes of spaces.
I don't think it should be discounted.
You remind me of those kids in class who were always asking, "Is this gonna be on the test?", just when the prof was getting to an interesting math concept.
Does art have any practical applications or uses? Classical music? Great literature? They ennoble mankind by their very existence.
And sometimes these things do end up having practical applications, many years down the road. I know mathematicians and physicists who study arcane branches of math and then apply them to the development of computer science. (Don't ask me how, I have no idea exactly what they're doing; they might as well be speaking Urdu for all I can understand of it.)