Timeline for How does the work of a pure mathematician impact society?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 9, 2019 at 13:45 | comment | added | user44143 | "Who would have though in 19th century that Minkowski Geometry...?" No one, since it was invented in the 20th century. | |
| Jul 19, 2013 at 20:47 | comment | added | Matthias Ludewig | Probably, but in "Measuring the world", Gauss thinks to himself that all parallels touch in the end; which would mean that the universe was positively curved, when actually it was negatively curved. But after all, that's fiction, I don't know any actual references. | |
| Jul 19, 2013 at 19:25 | comment | added | Marcus Johnson | I'm under the impression that Gauss seriously considered the possibility of the universe 'being' a non-Euclidean geometry... | |
| Jul 19, 2013 at 16:46 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by François G. Dorais | ||
| Jul 19, 2013 at 15:16 | comment | added | Matthias Ludewig | No, of course not, but it needed a lot of work on the side of pure mathematics to give the necessary foundations. I would say it was pure math until it happened to be relevant for Physics; this might be an example why you can say "who knows what this might be good for" when working on some seemingly abstract topic. | |
| Jul 19, 2013 at 13:38 | comment | added | mindplay.dk | I'm not an expert, but isn't General Relativity an example of theoretical physics? It involved maths, but Einstein was not a "pure" mathematician - is the theory of General Relativity considered a work of "pure" math? | |
| Jul 19, 2013 at 12:02 | comment | added | Matthias Ludewig | Well, he just constructed this as an example of a negatively curved space; but I would consider this as a pure academic interest in the first place. | |
| Jul 19, 2013 at 11:43 | comment | added | Marcus Johnson | Well, Gauss seemed to think so, didn't he? | |
| Jul 19, 2013 at 7:45 | history | answered | Matthias Ludewig | CC BY-SA 3.0 |