mathematics - classic or dud?

my thoughts: somewhat confused. it's quite likely that i'll spend the rest of my life doing pure maths; but isn't this just like doing crossword puzzles? is there any point to it if it can't be used, or is that the beauty of it? and does yr average man on the streets need to know anything about calculus anyway?

If you think that pure math has no use, you should reconsider your notion of usefulness.

classic

search: probability, laplace transforms

destroy: geometry and long division

josh - what definition of "use" are you using, then?

Math is undeniably classic, lookit my "name" fergawshsakes.

Poetry is grate but math has the #1 place in my heart For All Time.

I used to hate maths with a furious passion, despite being quite good at it, but now, suddenly,I find it amazingly interesting. This may well be because I no longer have to sit through GCSE maths classes though.

I've never found it interesting. I'm so purely a letter person that I preferred algebra to geometry because the variables were labeled with letters. I suppose it's not a bad thing, but that doesn't make me LIKE it.

JOSH WHAT IS USEFULNESS

A good deal of 'pure' math either has immediate consequences for the 'applied' math which is related to it, which in effect makes applied math more useful than it already is, because of its indispensability in scientific and technological work; or, it has no immediate use, but turns out (or so the history of math tells us) to be of great use in the above ways some time down the road, to our great surprise. Here's just one example: the theory of Hilbert spaces was formulated before quantum mechanics developed, for basically theoretical reasons. After quantum mechanics developed enough, and they came up with a theoretical framework for it (which was not just extraneous baggage - theoretical formulations of scientific theories help to clarify them and make further work easier, and sometimes, even possible at all), it turned out that quantum mechanical spaces were well represented by Hilbert spaces. One use of quantum mechanics: modern electronics, i.e. the stuff your computer is made from.

I can think of some areas of math that may be pretty useless, practically speaking, even given the above. But that's stuff like transfinite number theory, and... I can't even really think of anything else. Maybe some limited areas of mathematical logic, but even those things probably have uses I'm not aware of. For the most part, I think any given subfield of mathematics has extensive uses.

Jung felt math was just a skill you are born with and looked down on mathemeticians. I suck at math. F

yes i've sort of read things that implied that maths was inventing usefulness, in front of usefulness if you know what i mean, (or did I extrapolate that wrongly.) (I mean maths establishes a conceptual space, then something practical floods into it to fill it. But not by human agency - it seems as if the human 'discoveries' of mathematical things are followed by other practical discoveries, by coincidence, that require the maths.) Now I wrote that down it sounds too superficial. I thought also that maybe you would have some alternate definition of usefulness. This boring philosopher said 'I have lost my friends along the way to three things: chess, maths, and (?)' can't remember the last one. It's hard to reassure yourself just by thinking 'yes, but it may be useful one day, but I'm not sure' ...

Spline: Godel, Gauss, Euler, Ramunajan.
Divide: Pascal, Russell.

i have to disagree with josh here. i mean, obviously it's hard to predict what will become useful in the future, and i'll certainly concede that theoretical physics has a knack of picking up on areas of maths that i really wouldn't anticipate... *but* i'd still maintain that the vast majority of pure maths has no use.

ok, quantum mechanics uses hilbert spaces - but it doesn't use much of the theory of these spaces that has been developed over the last 80 (?) years. similarly, one can argue that number theory has a "use" because it has applications to cryptography; but the amount of number theory involved in this is nothing compared to the huge volume of research which has (as yet) no application.

it is always going to be hard to say that something will have no application, and my inability to see a use for most of pure maths could just be a failure of the imagination. but i find it very hard to see that the extreme abstraction one finds in modern maths research will ever be applied to anything.

I wish my training in maths had been more rigorous. As an engineer its a tool that I'm not very skilled at using. better training in maths would have made my course in acoustics far easier to understand and much more useful to me. And now i have to come up with a mathematical model for the way a certain type of honeycomb behaves when you vibrate it and i have no idea where to start.