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?
I’m studying EE in university, and have been surprised by just how much imaginary numbers are used
From what I’ve seen that’s one example where you could totally just use trig and pairs of numbers, though. I might be missing something, because I’m not an electrical engineer.
You can, they map, but complex numbers are much much easier to deal with
EE is absolutely fascinating for applications of calculus in general.
I didn’t give a shkt about calculus and then EE just kept blowing my mind.
I was gonna ask how imaginary numbers are often used but then you reminded me of EE applications and that’s totally true.