&#62;His point was math has to become relate able again<p>And there's the rub.  Having studied math in grad school, I'd say <i>at least</i> 99% of mathematics research has little or no connection to anything tangible in the real world.<p>One of my good friends is a professor of math, and every once in a while I make sure to rip on him about being "the world's leading expert in something nobody gives a shit about," because it's true.  There are probably fewer than 10 people in the world doing work that's closely related to what my friend is doing.<p>The thing is, (we) mathematicians <i>like</i> it that way.  We're proud of the fact that we choose to work on hard theoretical problems that might not have any kind of real world payoff in our lifetimes because what we're really doing is investigating fundamental logical structures.<p>And, to an extent, part of the reason it's hard to come up with applications of math to daily life is that the mathematics of daily life has become invisible.  Sure, I can talk about how CDs use error-correcting codes so they can survive being scratched up a bit and still play, or I can tell (say) my mom about how Google's pagerank algorithm works to help provide her with good quality hits when she searches the web, but CD's and Google searches are such a part of daily life anymore that these things utterly fail to impress.  The "average" person probably thinks mathematics is irrelevant to his or her daily life because they never studied much of it in school and still managed to get by without it.