Maybe depends on what's meant by application, but I'd say a lot of, probably most, research-level math has no (clear) practical applications and most research is not done from the PoV of applications or relationship to physical reality. Math is study of formal systems, sort of "what can and can't follow from some set of formal rules".
It's more a surprise that some rulesets map to physical world as well as they do [1].
For some there may be very important ones in the future like e.g. number theory got in cryptography. But for example just knowing whether P=?NP or if the Riemann hypothesis is true probably has no "physical reality" direct applications.
It's more a surprise that some rulesets map to physical world as well as they do [1].
For some there may be very important ones in the future like e.g. number theory got in cryptography. But for example just knowing whether P=?NP or if the Riemann hypothesis is true probably has no "physical reality" direct applications.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectivene...