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modeless • today at 4:09 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

"Malicious" is an overstatement, but "exploit" is completely fair in my view. Theory with no possible practical relevance is useless, and I think a computational complexity result requiring arbitrary-precision arithmetic that is impossible to implement using any physical system qualifies.


Replies

nullc • today at 4:11 AM

Plenty of mathematics was practically useless for long periods of time, waiting for us to invent computers, cryptography, error correcting codes, etc.

It's extremely hard to know what mathematics may be useful in the future or not.

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