> there's something funny about mathematics in that every novel result is broadly perceived as a big deal.

Is this true? Or is it just that mathematics is an isolated enough field that only the results that are a big deal get broadcast widely to the public.

I know little of the inner workings of the field of mathematics, but my naive assumption would be that there's probably lots of novel but boring results being discovered/proven all the time and we don't hear about them because no-one outside of the person doing the work and a handful of their colleagues is really that interested in it. Likely a lot aren't published in any way, because they're just stepping stones towards the goal of the actual area/paper/whatever being worked on.