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?

  • three_trains_in_a_trenchcoat@piefed.socialEnglish
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    1 day ago

    Non-linear equations have entered the chat.

    Chaos and non-linear dynamics were treated as a toy or curiosity for a pretty long time, probably in no small part due to the complexity involved. It’s almost certainly no accident that the first serious explorations of it after Poincare happen after the advent of computers.

    So, one place where non-linear dynamics ended up having applications was in medicine. As I recall it from James Gleick’s book Chaos, inspired by recent discussion of Chaotic behavior in non-linear systems, medical doctors came up with the idea of electrical defibrillation- a way to reset the heart to a ground state and silence chaotic activity in lethal dysrhythmias that prevented the heart from functioning correctly.

    Fractals also inspired some file compression algorithms, as I recall, and they also provide a useful means of estimating the perimeters of irregular shapes.

    Also, there’s always work being done on turbulence, especially in the field of nuclear fusion as plasma turbulence seems to have a non-trivial impact on how efficiently a reactor can fuse plasma.

    • dylanmorgan@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      A good friend of mine from high school got his physics PhD at University of Texas and went on to work in the high energy plasma physics lab there with the Texas Petawatt laser, and a lot of the experiments it was used for involved plasma turbulence and determining what path energetic particles would take in a hypothetical fusion reactor.

      • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Be honest, how many unofficial experiments were there?

        You ever just start lasering shit for kicks?

        • duckythescientist@sh.itjust.works
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          15 hours ago

          Probably not as many as we’d like to think. I recently got to run a few days of tests at Lawrence Livermore National Labs with an absurdly massive laser. At one point we needed to bring in a small speaker for an audio test. It took the lab techs and managers about two hours and a couple phone calls to some higher ups to make sure it was ok and wouldn’t damage anything. There’s so much red tape and procedure in the way that I don’t think there’s an opportunity to just fuck around. The laser has irreplaceable parts that people aren’t willing to jeopardize. Newer or smaller lasers are going to be more relaxed. This one is old enough to be my father, and it’s LLNL’s second biggest single laser iirc. And they are the lab using lasers for fusion, so they have big lasers.