Transcript: http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/importance.pdf

I went to a home improvement store to get some roller blinds cut. I needed these to be cut to exact measurements, because I have trouble sleeping. I bring the blinds to where the machine is and press the button. I note that the blade on this thing is just held on by a screw clamp to a piece of metal marked out like a ruler, so I could get any length I requested. Well, this girl shows up and tries to tell me that the machine doesn't do fractions. WTF? Is our math education so bad that we have people in the workforce who don't want to deal with 5/16ths?

Timothy Gowers does some pretty cool research, anything that cross fertilizes analysis and combinatorics is pretty awesome.

For the two problems in the talk regarding sequences of prime numbers, I suggest folks check out the green tao theorem : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green-Tao_theorem

He put it in a way that was interesting. That even if individual mathematicians weren't motivated by practicality and more by interestingness, as a whole, mathematics is richer because of it, and will be a more complete body of knowledge to be able to address future practical problems.

i find this one : http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Hamming.htm... to be quite nice too.