>I haven't seen anyone maintain or even express an interest in advanced math outside of academia

I'll admit that i take this a little personally, but what does this mean, "oustide of academia"? Where do you think an interest in advanced mathematics lives? Your complaint, on its face, seems to be that everyone interested enough to be doing advanced mathematics is employed doing it?

Do you mean to say that advanced mathematics has no practical use outside of making more mathematics?

I think what you will find is that the mathematicians have trouble extracting their benefit to society, given that mathematics is fundamentally not subject to copyright. We're happy to contribute as long as we get to eat something and, for the most part, we get to decide what we work on.

This is a pretty fucking good trade, since just about every problem offers some kind of insight into some other problem, and we're just an interested lot, so probably someone has spent a lot of time thinking about the problem that you're specifically interested in.

I don't think your complaint is coherent enough to really be argued against, unfortunately, as I would like to change your mind, so would you mind making more sense?