Mathematicians have a habit of studying, just for the fun of it, things that seem utterly useless; then centuries later their studies turn out to have enormous scientific value.
There is no better example of this than the work done by the ancient Greeks on the curves known as the conics: the ellipse, the parabola, and the hyperbola. They were first studied by one of Plato's pupils. No important scientific applications were found for them until the 17th century, when Kepler discovered that planets move in ellipses and Galileo proved that projectiles travel in parabolas.
Appolonious of Perga, a 3rd century B.C. Greek geometer, wrote the greatest treatise on the curves. His work "Conics" was the first to show how all three curves, along with the circle, could be obtained by slicing the same right circular cone at continuously varying angles.
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