>There are plenty of fields of mathematics that are so utterly boring
 >that you have to wonder why anybody studies them
 > - set theory, number theory, category theory, etc.)

And this exactly supports the author's ideas in
 >http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

- it is not that the set theory is boring,
rather the way it is presented in most of textbooks is.

 >I didn't say that set theory is not *important*. I said it is not
 >*interesting*. Certainly not to me, anyway.
 >The obvious stuff is obvious, and the non-obvious stuff is all tedious
 >riddle-like splitting of hairs rather than interesting insights.

 > If there *is* some kind of connection between set theory and 
arithmetic, it is highly non-obvious.

Check out Knuth's book of "How Two Ex-Students Turned on to Pure 
Mathematics and Found Total Happiness". Unfortunately, it's not so easy 
to find it in UK.

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