alt Hacker NewsNo, I don’t care. Until there is a real, practical result, I don’t care. There are plenty of examples of math discovered in service of solving a problem. There is nothing that says math has to be purely abstract first.
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Because clearly we’d have invented GPS if we had asked ourselves “how do I create a global positioning system with centimeter accuracy”?
And that's fine, caring about everything is exhausting, someone has to solve real world problem. But dismissing a result since it's not practical is not fine
You can't imagine how that severely limits the potential size of the discovery space shackling it to present day problems?
Ironic username as I doubt we'd get to the stars with your philosophy.
How far are you willing to go? In your radical pragmatism, are you an intuitionist, or even a finitist? Oh wait, these are pure math topics that you do not care a about!
Dudeee how far up your hind do you need to be to nit even appreciate the groundwork being laid out?
Like imagine Einstein without access to geometry work. You had others point you to number theory. What about Boole's algebra.
There is a pretty big list of seemingly useless pure math things suddenly finding a very practical use. Sometimes quite a bit later too. And we have no way of knowing beforehand.
And it's fine to not want to do such work yourself. But to dismiss it is, well, not very thoughtful.