There have been a number of Scientific discoveries that seemed to be purely scientific curiosities that later turned out to be incredibly useful. Hertz famously commented about the discovery of radio waves: “I do not think that the wireless waves I have discovered will have any practical application.”
Are there examples like this in math as well? What is the most interesting “pure math” discovery that proved to be useful in solving a real-world problem?
I work with a guy who is a math whiz and loves to talk. Yesterday while I was invoicing clients, he was telling me how origami is much more effective for solving geometry than a compass and a straight edge.
I’ll ask him this question.
My disclaimer: I don’t know what any of this means, but it might give you a direction to start your research.
First thing he came up with is Number Theory, and how they’ve been working on that for centuries, but they never would have imagined that it would be the basis of modern encryption. Multiplying a HUGE prime number with any other numbers is incredibly easy, but factoring the result into those same numbers is near impossible (within reasonable time constraints.)
He said something about knot theory and bacterial proteins, but it was too far above my head to even try to relay how that’s relevant.