What is the strangest math that turned out to be useful?
What is the strangest math that turned out to be useful?
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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The math fun fact I remember best from college is that Charles Boole invented Boolean algebra for his doctoral thesis and his goal was to create a branch of mathematics that was useless. For those not familiar with boolean algebra it works by using logic gates with 1s and 0s to determine a final 1 or 0 state and is subsequently the basis for all modern digital computing
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
Was he trying to dunk on his professors?
Yes and no
So no.
But also yes