Given the sterility of a lot of physics and sex appeal to nerds, the unpopularity of petroleum engineering, the very low pay for physics grads vs very high pay for petroleum engineering grads, the crucialness of petroleum products to the global economy which pays for all research, and of course the lamentable influence of 'the devil's excrement' & resource curse on regions like Iraq, I could more easily make the case that the professor was right than the student.
I actually agree with you, as evidenced by the fact that I got all my degrees in that area. But I feel like the professor would have said the same thing in the same tone of voice if he were a professor of butterfly taxonomy. I think experts tend to think what they are doing is the most important thing.
http://www.mathunion.org/general/prizes/2014
On August 13, 2014, at the opening ceremony of the [International Congress of Mathematicians](http://www.icm2014.org)) the Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize and several other prizes were announced.
A full list of awardees with short citations:
Fields medals:
Artur Avila
Quanta Magazine on Artur Avila
Manjul Bhargava
Quanta Magazine on Manjul Bhargava
Martin Hairer
Quanta Magazine on Martin Hairer
Maryam Mirzakhani
Quanta Magazine on Maryam Mirzakhani
Nevalinna prize:
Subhash Khot
Quanta Magazine on Subhash Khot
Gauss Prize:
Stanley Osher
Chern Medal Award:
Phillip Griffiths
Leelavati Prize:
Adrián Paenza
In addition to that, Georgia Benkart was announced as the 2014 ICM Emmy Noether lecturer.
It might be interesting to note a curious fact about the new group of Fields medalists:
However, this unusual diversity of nationalities does not necessarily translate into a corresponding diversity of institutions, since (according to wikipedia) three out of four winners work in (or at least are affiliated with) universities that have already had awardees in the past.
Some notes on the works by Fields medalists can be found on Terence Tao's blog.
A related discussion on Hacker News.