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?

  • bacon_pdp@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Donuts were basis of the math that would enable a planned economy to be more efficient than a market economy (which is a very hard linear algebra problem).

    Basically using that, your smart phone is powerful enough to run a planned economy with 30 million unique products and services. An average desktop computer would be powerful enough to run a planned economy with 400 million unique products and services.

    Odd that knowledge about it has been actively suppressed since it was discovered in the 1970s but actively used mega-corporations ever since…

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      8 hours ago

      It’s funny that you’re saying this is “actively suppressed” while not naming this field or providing links for further readings.

      • bacon_pdp@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        Donut mathematics is the name of the field; I literally named it. The writings on it are dense and only available in Russian and Mandarin Chinese. Further I provided the name of an author on the subject.

        What would you call the purposeful prevention of English/French/German/etc translations of the material?

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          2 hours ago

          Are you talking about the input-output thing? It assumes each sector produces exactly one thing, and is agnostic of growth, change and multiple non-equal possibilities existing. I’m skeptical.

          It’s not really covered up, either.

    • evujumenuk@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      That’s pretty interesting. Do you happen to have any introductory material to that topic?

      I mean, it might even have applications outside of running a techno-communist nation state. For example, for designing economic simulation game mechanics.