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Sorry for the silly question, but why spend time on this? Is it just for fun or is all mathematical exploration eventually useful? This feels closer to art than
by halapro 1y ago
Sorry for the silly question, but why spend time on this? Is it just for fun or is all mathematical exploration eventually useful? This feels closer to art than engineering.
- staplers 1y agoThings like this sometimes lead to practical inventions like velcro or self-locking mechanisms that could be useful. All it takes is someone to connect the dots or find a use case for it and change the world in a small way.
- kvdveer 1y agoThe problem itself might not be very applicable, but the techniques used to solve it might be. That said, researching something solely for the sake of curiosity can be a valid endeavour. Many profound scientific discoveries have been made by researching topics with no obvious application.
- mikepurvis 1y agoMathematicians spent decades agonizing about matrix transformations and surface normals, all entirely in the abstract, and then in the 80s that math turned out to be suddenly extremely practical and relevant to the field of computer graphics.
- halapro 1y agoWho pays for this abstract exploration? I get that "in the future" it could be useful, but today these researchers need money. Is it like open source where people just do it because they want to?
- ndsipa_pomu 1y agoSome maths is done just for fun/curiosity and other maths is more directed towards a specific goal. Both types of maths can end up being useful or useless (outside of maths, that is) and it's pretty much impossible to predict which areas are going to be incredibly useful or mere curiosities. Sometimes, the uses for obscure maths aren't even discovered for more than a century afterwards.
- daxfohl 1y agoI remember someone (G.H. Hardy?) saying something along the lines of "the only bad thing about math is that it can be useful."
- _whiteCaps_ 1y agoGeorge Boole might have some opinions on this.