Comment Re:The cost on human minds is high (Score 1) 46
Nice post and an interesting comparison, but I think there's one big difference: live music remains hugely popular and a big business despite recording technology, but you don't see a lot of people showing off their arithmetic skills for profit. Today's mathematicians are more akin to composers.
There's also an interesting historical side to the analogy, as the separation between composers and performing musicians is relatively modern (and only really applies to classical art music genres anyway). And as you pointed out about Euler et al, modern math started out as a way to simplify practical calculations, such as the geometry of farming and city planning, or accounting. But this also shows a crucial difference: music has never been so much about practical utility as it's about esthetic or emotional experience. So while modern math has become a thing with its own sense of beauty, simply adding up numbers isn't very fun — though some might disagree.