I remember a maths class I had in first year uni, one of our lecturers was a guy from the maths department named Stu, or something like that. He is (or at least was in those days) an applied mathematician, and didn’t see a lot of point in pure mathematics. After a side note about how some property of vectors could be extended to n dimensions if you were into that sort of pure maths stuff, he set about justifying his point of view.
“At the same time that Einstein was developing the theory of relativity, some joker was proving that anything multiplied by zero is really zero”
The reason for this story is that while reading through some preliminary stuff on number theory I came across a proof that anything multiplied by zero is really zero.