• TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    5 hours ago

    Wasn’t solving maths problems always a bit pointless? Not sure mathematicians necessarily pursued the field because of its pointfullness

    • hikaru755@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      3 hours ago

      Pointless as in “the end result might not be useful for any real world application”, often yes. But as I understand it, now it’s become a different flavor of pointless, “might not even be able to solve it before an AI steals the work I’ve done so far, solves it before I can, and gets all the credit”, which takes even the intrinsic motivation out of it.

    • lath@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      4 hours ago

      No. I can’t give any examples because I personally don’t give a damn, but there have been ‘pointlessly’ solved equations which only became of use much later in modern branches of technology.

      Random crap nobody cares about have a small chance to be useful in the far future for stuff we currently are unaware of.

      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        4 hours ago

        I mean my point being that traditionally, least historically, the idea of maths being solved for the purpose of a useful function was a bit banal, a bit frowned upon or looked down on.

    • Tenderizer@aussie.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      4 hours ago

      Any maths to do with cryptography certainly isn’t pointless. So P=NP is definitely consequential.