I wouldn't. Many if not most patents are awarded to the first person to encounter a problem and apply a (likely obvious) solution, not the first person to solve a longstanding problem at great expense after many others have tried and failed.

And even if that weren't the case, nobody needs to be given exclusive rights to math. In principle the law says as much, but in fact that's never been an obstacle.

You make good points, I think of it like this, Patents were meant to be for the public good, aka disclosure.

In modern software terms, to me, that means any software patent should be open sources, and they aren't, which is a worst of all worlds sort of thing.

My professor once mentioned how easy it is to be novel and interesting; Just have the interesting part be not novel and the novel part be not interesting!