I was hanging out with a friend of mine from high school, who is now a tenured math professor in Colorado, about a decade ago. This was just as ECC was getting popular among security people but hadn't really entered nerd mainstream yet.

He mentioned that he was working on elliptic curves, so I asked him how his work applies to ECC, and he asked me, "what's ECC?".

He had no idea his work was being used for security research. He just liked studying the properties of elliptic curves. After we chatted he did en up learning about how elliptic curves are used in cryptography.