What is the strangest math that turned out to be useful?
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Quake, not Doom. Doom didn't use true 3D rendering and had almost no dynamic lighting.
Oops. I thought that weird approximated constant was somewhere in the doom sources... Thanks I guess for correcting me.
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It’s crazy how engaging and well done Veritasium videos are and they’re just free to watch on YouTube.
And on spotify nowadays
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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?
Integration.
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It's imaginary numbers. Full stop. No debate about it. The idea of them is so wild that they were literally named imaginary numbers to demonstrate how silly they were, and yet they can be used to describe real things in nature.
I'm studying EE in university, and have been surprised by just how much imaginary numbers are used
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Oops. I thought that weird approximated constant was somewhere in the doom sources... Thanks I guess for correcting me.
Here's some math-related Doom content for you: John Romero accidentally coded in the wrong digit of pi in the 10th position, and this guy explores how the game rendering changes when pi is increasingly wrong
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wrote on last edited by [email protected]
That's a perfect example of a typical interaction between a Technology Management Consultant and somebody from a STEM area.
Techies with an Engineering background who are in Tech and Tech-adjacent companies are often in the receiving end of similar techno-bollocks which makes no sense from such "Technology" Management Consultants, but it's seldom quite as public as this one.
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I'm studying EE in university, and have been surprised by just how much imaginary numbers are used
I was gonna ask how imaginary numbers are often used but then you reminded me of EE applications and that's totally true.
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It's funny that you're saying this is "actively suppressed" while not naming this field or providing links for further readings.
Donut mathematics is the name of the field; I literally named it.
The writings on it are dense and only available in Russian and Mandarin Chinese. Further I provided the name of an author on the subject.What would you call the purposeful prevention of English/French/German/etc translations of the material?
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As far as I know, matrices were a "pure math" thing when they were first discovered and seemed pretty useless. Then physicists discovered them and used them for all sorts of shit and now they're one of the most important tools in in science, engineering and programming.
Huge in 3d graphics and AI.
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60 was chosen by the Ancient Sumerians specifically because of its divisibility by 2, 3, 4, and 5. Today, 60 is considered a superior highly composite number but that bit of theory wouldn’t have been as important to the Sumerians and Babylonians as the simple ability to divide 60 by many commonly used factors (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15) without any remainders or fractions to worry about.
12 is the most based number in that respect IMO.
But then...hey, we use that for hours!
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Shoutout to Satyendra Nath Bose who helped pioneer relativity as a theoretical physicist because he didn't want to study something useful that would benefit the British.
Same thing with early studies on prime numbers
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Donut mathematics is the name of the field; I literally named it.
The writings on it are dense and only available in Russian and Mandarin Chinese. Further I provided the name of an author on the subject.What would you call the purposeful prevention of English/French/German/etc translations of the material?
The phrase "donut mathematics" was not in your earlier comment. You literally did not name it.
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I'm studying EE in university, and have been surprised by just how much imaginary numbers are used
wrote on last edited by [email protected]EE is absolutely fascinating for applications of calculus in general.
I didn't give a shit about calculus and then EE just kept blowing my mind.
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It's imaginary numbers. Full stop. No debate about it. The idea of them is so wild that they were literally named imaginary numbers to demonstrate how silly they were, and yet they can be used to describe real things in nature.
I don't really get 'em. It seems like people often use them as "a pair of numbers." So why not just use a pair of numbers then?
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A math discovery unmotivated by research in other fields; just discovering math to see if it works out
With that as the definition I would say Boolean Algebra.
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12 is the most based number in that respect IMO.
But then...hey, we use that for hours!
and in parts of the world for inches to a foot. pretty useful for carpentry for example
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I don't really get 'em. It seems like people often use them as "a pair of numbers." So why not just use a pair of numbers then?
Because the second number has special rules and a unit. It's not just a pair of numbers, though it can be represented through a pair of numbers (really helpful for computing).
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A complex number is just two real numbers stitched together. It's used in many areas, such as the Fourier transform which is common in computer science is often represented with complex numbers because it deals with waves and waves are two-dimensional, and so rather than needing two different equations you can represent it with a single equation where the two-dimensional behavior occurs on the complex-plane.
In principle you can always just split a complex number into two real numbers and carry on the calculation that way. In fact, if we couldn't, then no one would use complex numbers, because computers can't process imaginary numbers directly. Every computer program that deals with complex numbers, behind the scenes, is decomposing it into two real-valued floating point numbers.
That's not quite accurate because the two numbers have a relationship with each other. i^2 = - 1, so any time you square a complex number or multiply two complex numbers, some of the value jumps from one dimension to the other.
It's like a vector, where sure, certain operations can be treated as if the dimensions of the vector are distinct, like a translation or scale. But other operations can have one dimension affecting the other, like rotation.
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I don't really get 'em. It seems like people often use them as "a pair of numbers." So why not just use a pair of numbers then?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I totally get your point, and sometimes it seems like that. Why not just use a coordinate system? Because in some applications the complex roots of equations is relevant.
If you square an imaginary number, it's no longer an imaginary number. Now it's a real number! That's not something you can accomplish with something like a pair of numbers alone.
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It's imaginary numbers. Full stop. No debate about it. The idea of them is so wild that they were literally named imaginary numbers to demonstrate how silly they were, and yet they can be used to describe real things in nature.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I mean, quaternions are the weirder version of complex numbers, and they're used for calculating 3D rotations in a lot of production code.
There's also the octonions and (much inferior) Clifford algebras beyond that, but I don't know about applications.
