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?
Does this count? Because it really is wtf.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
The exact example I also thought of from the question! Well done
Doom absolutely counts!
Quake, not Doom. Doom didn’t use true 3D rendering and had almost no dynamic lighting.