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Major Advances In Knot Theory
An anonymous reader sends us to Science News, which is running a survey of recent strides in finding an answer to the age-old question: How many ways are there to tie your shoelaces? "Mathematicians have been puzzling over that question for a century or two, and the main thing they've discovered is that the question is really, really hard. In the last decade, though, they've developed some powerful new tools inspired by physics that have pried a few answers from the universe's clutches. Even more exciting is that the new tools seem to be the tip of a much larger theory that mathematicians are just beginning to uncover. That larger mathematical theory, if it exists, may help crack some of the hardest mathematical questions there are, questions about the mathematical structure of the three- and four-dimensional space where we live. ... Revealing the full ... superstructure may be the work of a generation."
This is just not that important.
Are you sure?
When algebra was invented, did people think that was important? What about geometry or calculus? What about number theory? Would Euler's study of the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg have been important to you? Probably not. But it did lay the foundations for modern graph theory which engineers use to design computer networks.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Back when I was going to school for my Comp Sci degree, I was force-fed a lot of calculus.
Roughly twice as much calculus as was typical, because my disinterest (and the resultant lack of success) required me to take almost every single calculus course twice.
No sooner was I free of school than I brain-dumped every single last integral, deriviative, partial derivative, chain rule, trigometric identity... the lot of it. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
And then, some time later, I was trying to make my race car go faster. The problem was optimising the suspension for maximum grip, and to that end, I had affixed linear potentiometers to my suspension so I could record suspension position during a race.
Pretty soon, I had tons of data relating position to time. Pretty graphs, but aside from max/min/mean deflection data, pretty useless.
Until I started thinking about "position to time... position to time... where had I heard that before?"
That's right - my old arch-nemesis, calculus, suddenly proved useful. Deriving that position information gave me suspension velocity, and suddenly I knew EXACTLY what suspension velocities the car was seeing in actual competition. Given that I had a device that measured shock force as a function of velocity (that's how a shock works) I could now tune shocks independant of the driver's ass-dyno.
That resulted in a HUGE leap forward in my performance.
Don't dis abstract math - you never know when it'll pay off.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
A mere comment about priorities, relative importance of issues, and so forth. In any case, I was not the only one to make such a comment.
Frankly, mathematics is more important than any other issue. You just fail to realize the practical applications that mathematics has in everyone's life. The most basic reason that anyone on earth has a standard of living above that of hunter gatherers is because of mathematics; knowing seasons and how to plant crops relied on rudimentary mathematics, and modern farming relies on advanced chemistry and biology, which have as their basis the mathematics of stoichiometry and statistics. Not to mention engineering which makes heavy use of mathematics and physics in order to create the machines necessary for our massive population.
In short, I'd rather see advances in mathematics than I would the elimination of world hunger; without further mathematical and scientific discoveries, even nations with plenty will just exhaust their resources and revert to poverty and starvation.