alt Hacker NewsIt's a delightful counterintuition that your gut feeling is mostly wrong: https://webhomes.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf
Far from being motivated by some applications, the most useful discoveries in mathematics are usually discovered "for their own sake" and their application is only discovered later. Sometimes centuries later!
Replies
skybrian • today at 3:11 PM
If so that seems like an opportunity for people who want to work on applied math? There’s a big backlog of techniques that so far have not been useful.
dennis_jeeves2 • today at 3:10 PM
>are usually discovered "for their own sake"
Like prime numbers? (used in cryptography)
Parents reads as a comment on the usefulness of applying mathematics to problems in the world (applied mathematics) and discovering mathematical problems that push mathematics forward (pure mathematics) in the process. Pure mathematics is incredibly important, but I’d hardly count it as useful if we need to wait centuries.