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 mean, quaternions are the weirder version of complex numbers, and they’re used for calculating 3D rotations in a lot of production code.
There’s also the octonions and (much inferior) Clifford algebras beyond that, but I don’t know about applications.
Yeah but aren’t quaternions basically just a weird subgroup of 2x2 complex matrices?