I genuinely don’t understand why most people believe that math has to be useful/applicable for industry right now to be worth pursuing.
Lots of areas of pure math might not be “applicable”, but even number theory that’s used everywhere now was “the purest area of math”.
Conversation
Yeah I love applications of maths in computery programming language stuff (and so often approch stuff from that perspective), but I love the 'pure' stuff too… a bit like how I also like people goofing around with 'esoteric' languages, etc.
1
It's not a perfect metaphor, but yeah I wish we valued both applications-driven and non-applications-driven 'because it's there' styles of exploration. Kind of like how I get sad when people don't see the point of the arts or get annoyed with strange looking buildings but IDK.
1
1
I wonder if there is often a scale of stuff too… like some more theoretical/pure stuff can be driven by theoretical applications? But if you look from the perspective of somebody doing something more commonly accepted/seen as ‘applied’ it all just looks pure and theoretical?