I too am doing the popcorn munching. I doubt I will ever be able to use what I am reading about. I don't work on things that are that involved. I do understand the curiousness of the choice.

However, I recall that when I was working at Cray Research back in the 90's, they took a bunch of very expensive computing time to calculate pi out to some ridiculously huge number of decimal places. Set a world record in doing so at the time if I recall correctly. I also recall that we were in the middle of one of those crises (oil?, unemployment? outsourcing?) and thinking that the very expensive compute time could have been spent on one or another of those intractable problems. I don't know what was learned from the exercise in pi, I presume something(perhaps mistakenly). I figure that in this case, the subject-matter is of interest to someone, and they find it challenging. Good for them. I am learning along the way, and ain't gonna look the gift-horse in the mouth... :-)