I'm not sure any more. I've once stumbled on a paper that claimed to solve the problem of balancing chemical reactions, where they tried to figure out in which proportion the compounds react. This is as simple as finding the null space of the corresponding matrix, and indeed the paper did more or less that, but it referenced a whole ream of other papers that all seemed to be trying to rediscover the same solution to a simple linear algebra problem. To this day I don't know if it was some kind elaborate joke or not.

In the David C. Lay book, this approach is so natural that it's even referenced as an application of row reduction when first introduced lol