My brother once suggested that there are probably bits of code/algorithms that would be world changing if they were released in academic journals, but instead were written by some unknowing programmer in an afternoon for their job coding embedded systems for refrigerators.

This particular example may be unlikely, but it's a very fun idea.

Lots of people working in different fields end up reinventing things that have been known to math for centuries, often in clunky roundabout ways. I imagine some of them figure out things not known to math, but it's far more likely to go the other way.

> Lots of people working in different fields end up reinventing things that have been known to math for centuries

I remember reading, about a year or two ago, about a medical doctor that published a paper rediscovering calculus (I just looked it up, it happened in 1994, there’s been many articles and videos about it)

lmao: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai%27s_model

This is such a great story

It's not clear from the Wikipedia article linked below whether she was rediscovering part of calculus or knowingly rebranding it. Do you know more details?

Folks shouldn’t be afraid to “rediscover” stuff.

Primarily because the learnings you make are the same as the original “discoverer”. Without those learnings, you might not be able to arrive at your true destination.

>Folks shouldn’t be afraid to “rediscover” stuff.

Luckily no one is suggesting that.

A lot of people suggest that. So many that it has become an idiom. "Don't reinvent the wheel."

it's a fact of geographical and social independence.. so far there's no way to know what everybody did or is doing (well there's twitter but it's configured on noise rather than signal)

A lot of the time engineers are focussed with solving a problem, to build a working machine/program, while academics just want to publish.

This is also true with patents.

Iirc, Heisenberg reinvented Matrix calculations to solve a problem in quantum physics. Not being a mathematician, he wasn't aware of the concept. Born recognized what Heisenberg had done and introduced him to his own reinvention.

PBS Space Time released a video with that story yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-Q5r3THR3M

An anonymous 4chan user once solved a 25 year old maths problem, to answer a question about the watch order of an anime. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-surprisingly-...

Jokes aside, let's say someone does figure out how to break RSA over a weekend project. The evil options are easy to come up with, but what is the actually responsible, ethical, thing to do? Never tell anyone?

Contact a known and trusted security researcher who can verify to the world that you did what you said you did, so everyone else can have as much time as possible to figure out exactly how fucked they are. Doing nothing isn’t an option; once someone figures something like that out, it signifies that conditions were ripe for the discovery to be made, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s discovered again independently.

Also fairly reasonable to assume it has already been done by someone who had a motive to break it and is keeping quiet.

Pretend you had developed a quantum computing advancement and push people to post quantum encryption

Migrating to post quantum encryption is important, but it's also important to not be herded into a "solution" that can be/has been easily compromised.

https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html