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You can't patent F=MA but you can patent a weapon such that you drop large rocks off of cliffs to bonk people on the head. The patent covers something that use

You can't patent F=MA but you can patent a weapon such that you drop large rocks off of cliffs to bonk people on the head. The patent covers something that uses natural processes and mathematics but not the underlying mathematics or natural process. In software this means something like quicksort could be patented(if it passed the nonobviousness clause) but the mathematics behind it recurrence relations, divide and conquer, big O analysis, etc. would be unpatentable. If there is a difference between mathematicians vs. inventors it is an understanding that a mathematical description of a thing and the thing itself are two different things(one of which is patentable).

jlgreco 13y ago
You can model a rock-dropper-omatic with mathematics, but what you get is just a mathematical description of the rock-dropper-omatic, it isn't a rock-dropper-omatic itself. However a mathematical description of an algorithm is the algorithm. There is no dichotomy. Quicksort isn't "not math, but describable with math", it is math. Same with FFT algorithms, and the Pythagorean theorem. You wouldn't dare say that a "mathematical description of the Pythagorean theorem" is a distinct entity from the theorem itself (and that one of them is patentable)...