It is a lucky thing that newspaper reporters do not attend these meetings. If they did, they would see how little our activities are related to the real needs of society.

L. E. Dickson, during a discussion period that followed the presentation of a paper at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society, where he criticized the choice of the paper’s topic. Fifteen minutes later he presented a paper of his own outlining a proof that every sufficiently large integer can be written as a sum of, not 1140 tenth powers (the best previous result), but 1046 tenth powers.

Source: Howard Eves in Return to Mathematical Circles