Rudyard Kipling and applied math

This evening something reminded me of the following line from Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem If:

… If all men count with you, but none too much …

It would be good career advice for a mathematician to say “Let all areas of math count with you, but none too much.” This warns against dismissing something offhand because you’re sure you’ll never use it, and becoming so fond of something that it becomes a solution in search of a problem.

The same applies to technology: Let all technologies count with you, but none too much.

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