Does this count? Because it really is wtf.
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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IIRC quaternions were considered pretty useless until we started doing 3D stuff on computers and now they're used everywhere
This talk by Freya Holmer on Quarternions is awesome and worth anybody’s time that like computer graphics, computer science, or just math.
That was a cool watch. Thanks.
I wonder if complex numbers predate the discovery of electromagnetism
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Complex numbers. Also known as imaginary numbers. The imaginary number i is the solution to √-1. And it is really used in quantum mechanics and I think general relativity as well.
I’m the akshually guy here, but complex numbers are the combination of a real number and an imaginary number. Agree with you, just being pedantic.
Sure, but 1 is a real number. 😜
Yes, and 1 is also a complex number.
Electromagnetics as well.
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Not math but the discovery of Thermus aquaticus was seemingly useless but later had profound applications in medicine. There's a good Veritasium video on it
Non-linear equations have entered the chat.
Chaos and non-linear dynamics were treated as a toy or curiosity for a pretty long time, probably in no small part due to the complexity involved. It's almost certainly no accident that the first serious explorations of it after Poincare happen after the advent of computers.
So, one place where non-linear dynamics ended up having applications was in medicine. As I recall it from James Gleick's book Chaos, inspired by recent discussion of Chaotic behavior in non-linear systems, medical doctors came up with the idea of electrical defibrillation- a way to reset the heart to a ground state and silence chaotic activity in lethal dysrhythmias that prevented the heart from functioning correctly.
Fractals also inspired some file compression algorithms, as I recall, and they also provide a useful means of estimating the perimeters of irregular shapes.
Also, there's always work being done on turbulence, especially in the field of nuclear fusion as plasma turbulence seems to have a non-trivial impact on how efficiently a reactor can fuse plasma.
A good friend of mine from high school got his physics PhD at University of Texas and went on to work in the high energy plasma physics lab there with the Texas Petawatt laser, and a lot of the experiments it was used for involved plasma turbulence and determining what path energetic particles would take in a hypothetical fusion reactor.
Be honest, how many unofficial experiments were there?
You ever just start lasering shit for kicks?
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I've read that all modern cryptography is based on an area (number theory?) that was once only considered "useful" for party tricks.
prime number factorization is the basis of assymetric cryptography. basically, if I start with two large prime numbers (DES was 56bit prime numbers iirc), and multiply them, then the only known solution to find the original prime numbers is guess-and-check. modern keys use 4096-bit keys, and there are more prime numbers in that space than there are particles in the universe. using known computation methods, there is no way to find these keys before the heat death of the universe.
DES is symmetric key cryptography. It doesn't rely on the difficulty of factorizing large semi-primes. It did use a 56-bit key, though.
Public key cryptography (DSA, RSA, Elliptic Curve) does rely on these things and yes it's a 4096-bit key these days (up from 1024 in the older days).
thank you
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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…
I'd like to read up on this if you have sources
Look up Wassily Wassilyevich Leontief
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.
Well Wassily Wassilyevich Leontief won a Nobel prize in economics for his work on this subject that might help you get started
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