alt Hacker NewsI was talking to a mathematician friend about this, and she was telling me that a lot of the proofs that have been produced in the past couple weeks don't have an application.
To me it begs the question: in a theoretical world where we don't have human mathematicians anymore, what is the point of these proofs if there's no human who actually understands it?
If the point of a lot of this math is only to expand the boundaries of human knowledge, it all seems kind of pointless.
Replies
Often, we don't know the applications of new math. For a long period of time we had "useless", "purely theoretical" mathematics that eventually turned into relativity and quantum mechanics.
Proofs are somewhat like legos. A bigger toolbox of them can only help in solving other, possibly practical, problems.
As far as the utility of a human being involved -- In a non-theoretical world where we don't have feline mathematicians, what is the point of these proofs if there is no cat which actually understands it? The cats can benefit from, for example, advances to optimziation algorithms that reduce costs for cat food delivery, of course.
heh these models should be turned loose on all the proofs paid for and sitting on the shelf and see if they can find an actual application useful to mankind.