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?
Non-Euclidean geometry was developed by pure mathematicians who were trying to prove the parallel line postulate as a theorem. They realized that all of the classic geometry theorems are all different if you start changing that postulate.
This led to Riemannian geometry in 1854, which back then was a pure math exercise.
Some 60 years later, in 1915, Albert Einstein published the theory of general relativity, of which the core mathematics is all Riemannian geometry.
This won’t make any sense to any of you right now, but: E = md3
That’s a perfect example of a typical interaction between a Technology Management Consultant and somebody from a STEM area.
Techies with an Engineering background who are in Tech and Tech-adjacent companies are often in the receiving end of similar techno-bollocks which makes no sense from such “Technology” Management Consultants, but it’s seldom quite as public as this one.
The math fun fact I remember best from college is that Charles Boole invented Boolean algebra for his doctoral thesis and his goal was to create a branch of mathematics that was useless. For those not familiar with boolean algebra it works by using logic gates with 1s and 0s to determine a final 1 or 0 state and is subsequently the basis for all modern digital computing
George Boole introduced Boolean algebra, not Charles. Charles, according to this site on the Boole family, he had a career in management of a mining company.
Man, I’ve had the wrong Boole in my head this whole time? Guess I have a 0 somewhere that I should have a 1
This is such a fucking cheeky pun I cannot even be mad at it.
Was he trying to dunk on his professors?
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.
Does this count? Because it really is wtf.
Doom absolutely counts!
Quake, not Doom. Doom didn’t use true 3D rendering and had almost no dynamic lighting.
Oops. I thought that weird approximated constant was somewhere in the doom sources… Thanks I guess for correcting me.
Imaginary numbers probably, they’re useful for a lot of stuff in math and even physics (I’ve heard turbulent flow calculations can use them?) but they seem useless at first
Not math but the discovery of Thermus aquaticus was seemingly useless but later had profound applications in medicine. There’s a good Veritasium video on it
Donuts were basis of the math that would enable a planned economy to be more efficient than a market economy (which is a very hard linear algebra problem).
Basically using that, your smart phone is powerful enough to run a planned economy with 30 million unique products and services. An average desktop computer would be powerful enough to run a planned economy with 400 million unique products and services.
Odd that knowledge about it has been actively suppressed since it was discovered in the 1970s but actively used mega-corporations ever since…
That’s pretty interesting. Do you happen to have any introductory material to that topic?
I mean, it might even have applications outside of running a techno-communist nation state. For example, for designing economic simulation game mechanics.
Well Wassily Wassilyevich Leontief won a Nobel prize in economics for his work on this subject that might help you get started
There’s no such thing as a Nobel Prize in economics. Economists got salty about this and came up with the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and rely on the media shortening it to something that gets confused with real Nobel Prizes.
Fair point
Maybe they’re scared that project Cybersyn would actually work
Integration.
Integration was literally developed to be useful
Riemann went nuts working on higher dimensional mathematics and linear algebra. At the time there was not a clear use case for math higher than like 3 or 4 dimensions, but he drove himself crazy discovering it anyways. Today, this kind of math underlies all of artificial intelligence
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