One thing that one needs to be careful with with that sort of thing is that something can be only incidentally cited. A strict citation check won’t detect that. But yes, some areas are definitely more directly helpful than others. Regarding what Gowers has to say, I’d say that that’s true in general, but some mathematicians do do work on more directly applicable work.
One thing that one needs to be careful with with that sort of thing is that something can be only incidentally cited. A strict citation check won’t detect that. But yes, some areas are definitely more directly helpful than others. Regarding what Gowers has to say, I’d say that that’s true in general, but some mathematicians do do work on more directly applicable work.