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I suspect you're being sarcastic. As a species, engineers are currently way more successful than pure mathematicians because of their higher "frequency dependen
by tw1010 9y ago
I suspect you're being sarcastic. As a species, engineers are currently way more successful than pure mathematicians because of their higher "frequency dependent fitness" (to use terminology from biology), meaning that because of the huge number of engineers that do the small incremental improvements, looking at all of them as a single organism makes them look more well adapted to the innovation landscape than the (pure) mathematicians. But if you normalize for population size, if you were to pit an equal number of pure mathematicians against engineers, then I suspect the former would prove to be more innovative, at least on a medium to long term horizon, than the latter.
- davesque 9y agoListen, I respect and love pure mathematics as much as the next guy. However, where's the utility in establishing, with any more clarity, exactly which field should be understood as being responsible for the biggest innovations? This feels like a needless detour into a tired debate which has already been hashed over countless times.
- tw1010 9y agoI agree. I was mostly addressing your argument that the output of each field (engineering vs math) is a good marker of ability to innovate (which needn't be true because of their relative population size).