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I kind of see these as beautiful as well. Pure Math can be very beautiful if you know what you're looking at.
This seems like exchanging music for architecture.
... I would not take that offer
EDIT @orangecat sorry I meant to respond to OP
This word is not used to refer to uninspired suburbs, you know. Maybe for you the choice is indeed between suburbs and tasteful Gothic cathedrals or pretty magical houses, but that's a whole different aesthetic axis. «Squalor» is the word for Mumbai, Barnaul, worse parts of San Francisco or Paris and so on – though it's extremely prevalent throughout the «developing» world.
There is a certain aspect of spiritual squalor to tacky advertisement and ridiculous postmodern design, I suppose, but those things are overwhelmingly shaped by influences different from poverty and neglect. They are more ideological: sometimes expressing brutal utilitarianism (this unites them with the Warsaw Block brand of squalor), sometimes deliberately offending the onlookers. Perhaps clarifying terms would be of use.
Squalor is a major and entirely unjustifiable aspect of human suffering (though perhaps for some people, living in squalor would be a small price to pay for the privilege of reading Peter Scholze). It is more debatable whether recreational math and science are worth tolerating modern ugliness. I think the space of potentially useful math is so vast (even just quantum physics and computer science provide gargantuan Truth Mines, and of course much of clever math can be preserved for training/evaluations), that we might well win on making this trade. There's also bonus utility in a) disempowering people who promote ugliness and b) embarrassing glass bead champs who just can't get it up for applied disciplines nor see anything beautiful in them. In my experience these people are spoiled; their self-esteem, grounded in intellectual superiority, and knowledge of being unproductive by ordinary metrics, make for a noxious mix – they learn to perceive themselves as the chosen caste, those for whom the rest of humanity exists as mere means to an end; they insist on the distinction between «pure» and «applied» specifically to show their contempt for the cattle of no Inherent Worth. I feel the same way about haughty artists (who think the world exists to sponsor their indulgent scribbles, thus AI must be banned), and in general despise people with strong «aristocratic elite» identity, though tolerating their immature antics seems to be net positive (and granting free rein to salty anti-elitists is profoundly net negative). This is more or less a normie attitude.
But ultimately this truly is a strawman, and this kind of choice does not present itself. Ugliness is not in any way a tradeoff we must accept to maintain modern economic productivity that allows universal education and pure math departments. It doesn't enable nor pay for that. I think it does not even spuriously correlate with ugliness – in every era, prettier places tend to produce more intellectual beauty too. And pure math cannot meaningfully compensate for the lack of physical beauty. It is idiosyncratic to conflate those different realms.
P.S. I of course despise «the spirit» of the question because of how loaded it is, on top of being strawmannish. The strawman aspect is only the decoy. Can you ever write without these attempts to mislead and own the opposition? You objected to people's dissatisfaction with, basically, lack of beautiful new architecture with «but there's a lot of new math». In this survey you do not propose trading like for like – modern physical ugliness for modern math; but an eternity of future non-utilitarian math and science for contemporary, transient building codes, as if any of those buildings would stand more than a century or two. Seriously, what the fuck.
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