Yes, and Labourie said that most mathematicians looked down on it, just as physicists think of engineering as a lesser academic discipline because it's just "applied physics." Probability is and was of course of great use, but it wasn't for most mathematicians.
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I don't think mathematicians generally thought what Kolmogorov, Levy, Feller, Tukey, etc. were doing was not difficult or worth attention relative to work in other fields, at least judging by their recognitions, involvement in organisations, etc.
Again, Labourie’s point was not that they thought the work was not difficult or that it wasn’t useful. He meant they thought it wasn’t relevant, in the same way a particle theorist might likely think the latest solid state idea has no implications for a unified theory.
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I think I've given plenty of indications so far for why even this watered-down view is historically incorrect and anachronistic. The quote tells us a lot more about biases in later years than about mid-century math.
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Ok, I’m not convinced that probabilistic methods were in the toolkit of most mid-century algebraists and geometers. The “central” part of Labourie’s quote is arguing that now they are. Would the Terry Tao of that day have been using ergodic theory to tackle prime numbers?
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