> You don't study mathematics or computer science and information theory to produce commodities. You study them to transform your mind.

Normatively, this ought to be true. Descriptively, this is of course false. Our entire society is organized around producing commodities, typically by consuming people as inputs.

It’s not ‘of course false’, and, to be honest, I can only assume you have little idea what mathematicians actually do.

Most pure mathematicians are no more interested in ‘producing commodities’ than any other academic is. That’s not what the subject is about — at all. The confusion arises because mathematics turns out to be extremely useful (no surprise; it’s quite useful to have a detailed understanding of the basic principles of reality).

Again, this seems to be an alarmingly common fallacy here on HN. As a commenter above observed, pure mathematics (and that is what we’re talking about here) is in important ways closer to the humanities than it is to other sciences.

Not exactly. The input to produce commodities is labour-power (the potential to perform labour). Education or study is the process of producing the commodity of labour-power, the potential labour of a mathematician who can do some sort of specific work.