The Long Game of Research

Re:The Long Game of Research by commandlinefan on Saturday August 24, 2019 @08:54PM (#20790675)

My mother once asked me why anybody cared about prime numbers - “they’re there, but so what?” I told her that prime numbers are actually an important part of public-key cryptography. It occurred to me that prime numbers had been studied for _centuries_ before somebody figured out a way to use them to secure communications.

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Re:The Long Game of Research by abdullahkhalids on Sunday August 25, 2019 @04:41AM (#20792001)

1. Doing math is fun and interesting. Like someone who is interested in riddles or poetry. You don't really need to do these things, but we find fun in the novelty and surprise, so we do it. Math is the same as growing flowers. One is pleasing to look at, the other pleasing to think about.

2. Ask her why we know prime ministers are there? Because somebody was playing with math and noticed that some numbers don't have non-trivial divisors. So with a some effort we saw a pattern that we could not see before. That was fun.

3. Maybe there are other patterns that are out there, or other things to know about primes. Clearly, it takes effort. So we keep exploring, hoping for the next dopamine hit. That's all. We are just math druggies.

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Re:The Long Game of Research by hyperpallium on Sunday August 25, 2019 @08:35AM (#20792612)

Ironically, they even wrote essays glorifying pure mathematic's uselessness:

> > No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely that anyone will do so for many years. [1]

> Since then number theory was used to crack German enigma codes and much later, figure prominently in public-key cryptography. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician's_Apology

[1] Hardy's "A Mathematician's Apology" http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~mss/misc/A%20Mathematician's%20... [pdf]

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Re:The Long Game of Research by willis936 on Saturday August 24, 2019 @10:21PM (#20790956)

Math is fun. Why do people play frisbee?

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Re:The Long Game of Research by TeMPOraL on Sunday August 25, 2019 @06:14AM (#20792205)

If someone's experience with frisbee were being forced, day after day for many years, to throw a disc through increasingly arcane set of hoops, and God forbid they try to throw it to another person, then you'd have a lot of work first explaining to that person how frisbee can be fun.

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Re:The Long Game of Research by Vinnl on Sunday August 25, 2019 @07:04AM (#20792301)

I think the implied question is: why do people care enough about prime numbers to pay people to research them?

We pay people to play sports because we enjoy watching them do so, but that argument does not hold for maths - so your rhetorical question does not answer the implied question, I think.

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