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?
IIRC quaternions were considered pretty useless until we started doing 3D stuff on computers and now they’re used everywhere
This talk by Freya Holmer on Quarternions is awesome and worth anybody’s time that like computer graphics, computer science, or just math.
That was a cool watch. Thanks.
I wonder if complex numbers predate the discovery of electromagnetism
Yes, mathematicians first encountered equations which could only be solved with complex numbers in the 16th century.