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What is the strangest math that turned out to be useful? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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There have been a number of Scientific discoveries that seemed to be purely scientific curiosities that later turned out to be incredibly useful. Hertz famously commented about the discovery of radio waves: “I do not think that the wireless waves I have discovered will have any practical application.”

Are there examples like this in math as well? What is the most interesting "pure math" discovery that proved to be useful in solving a real-world problem?

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[–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Would that make it less true? Complex numbers can be seen as a weird subgroup of the 2x2 real matrices. (And you can "stack" the two representations to get 4x4 real quaternions)

Furthermore, octonions are non-associative, and so can't be a subgroup of anything (although you can do a similar thing using an alternate matrix multiplication rule). They still show up in a lot of the same pure math contexts, though.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    I just think complex vector spaces are a great place to stop your abstraction

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Stopping while we're ahead? Never!

    /s, but also I'm sort of in this picture.

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