this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2026
30 points (94.1% liked)
Australia
5157 readers
216 users here now
A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.
Before you post:
If you're posting anything related to:
- The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
- Politics, post it to Australian Politics
- World News/Events, post it to World News
- A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian
If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:
- When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment
Banner Photo
Congratulations to @Tau@aussie.zone who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Australian Politics
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
- Aussie Memes
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
Moderation
Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.
Additionally, we have our instance admins: @lodion@aussie.zone and @Nath@aussie.zone
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Wasn't solving maths problems always a bit pointless? Not sure mathematicians necessarily pursued the field because of its pointfullness
No. I can't give any examples because I personally don't give a damn, but there have been 'pointlessly' solved equations which only became of use much later in modern branches of technology.
Random crap nobody cares about have a small chance to be useful in the far future for stuff we currently are unaware of.
I mean my point being that traditionally, least historically, the idea of maths being solved for the purpose of a useful function was a bit banal, a bit frowned upon or looked down on.
Oh, snobbism. I see, my bad.
Yeah that was like their whole thing.
And by 'they', do you mean the hypothetical mathematicians in your mind that would prefer that their maths is not applicable to any kind of practical applications?
Specific mathematicians and societies which were critical to the early development of the field. It is at the very core of the culture, at least in its origination.
Math was pure philosophy and a pursuit for the landed gentry.
Not sure why anyone thinks this is controversial. Its all there in the history books. This is what they said about themselves.
Pointless as in "the end result might not be useful for any real world application", often yes. But as I understand it, now it's become a different flavor of pointless, "might not even be able to solve it before an AI steals the work I've done so far, solves it before I can, and gets all the credit", which takes even the intrinsic motivation out of it.
Any maths to do with cryptography certainly isn't pointless. So P=NP is definitely consequential.
I think you missed the point.