I expect not very important in practice, because 1. We've settled on using IEEE 754 floating point numbers, and all their tolerance quirks, in practice, and st

I expect not very important in practice, because 1. We've settled on using IEEE 754 floating point numbers, and all their tolerance quirks, in practice, and still the bridges don't fall down 2. The author describes it as a little-studied field where "most of the people who would be good at working on this are doing something more useful instead" But still, useless pure-maths distractions have a way of yielding results in unexpected fields. Maybe, as the author hints, a solution to this problem would bring us some information-theory insights and some new methods for cryptography or compression or whatever else.