i'm terrible at explaining what i do to people. while on a shuttle from the airport, a biology postdoc asked me what sort of math do i do. it was then that i froze.
from now on, i will not call them applied mathematicians but mathematical scientists.
i'm convinced that theoretical mathematicians cannot explain themselves, even to scientists. we are like the O-negative blood type: our work can be used by non-mathematicians, but we cannot use the work of non-mathematicians. hence applied folks, if capable of speaking to scientists, must be scientists.
that doesn't mean that they aren't mathematicians. far from it: they may be excellent mathematicians, capable of great things and fine work. they just happen to be able to present themselves also as scientists. we theorists have no such flexibility.
also, i will hereby use the default answer of:
"oh, what i study is absolutely useless"
whenever someone asks me about the applications of my work. it's true, from my viewpoint. there are no immediate, non-mathematical applications which come to mind.
if they want to know how it is related to science, say how the field began, then sure, i'll answer that. but they have to ask explicitly that, because it's not worth wasting time and proffering illusions of mathematics as some science, or something very real.
mathematics is not real, or at least, not fully so. it is abstraction. for some inexplicable reason, when polished to something computational, it just happens to be useful .. in frighteningly many settings, and it will probably continue being useful.
but i still cannot say why, why it is useful. a mathematicial scientist would know better; i leave such things to such people. i'm happy to be useless, contribute nothing to today's society except sate its sense of progress. we are as useless as artists and poets and philosophers ..
.. but isn't it funny, how it is art and literature and philosophy that we remember from older civilizations, and not their technology, their science, and their engineering? we don't fully know how the egyptians built their pyramids, and except for reasons of historical posterity, i don't think we much care.
after all, with bulldozers and cargo planes and laser cutters and explosives, we could build better pyramids, and more quickly and efficiently.
we have abandoned steam engines and vacuum tubes. if we retain our computers, then still, their form will change. we already smirk at 386's, right?
but we remember culture; it persists in memory, despite not contributing directly to the progress of its society, in its time. so how is that, for "useless?"
4 comments:
An interesting view!
One philosophical viewpoint I have been entertaining of late is that mathematicians are like explorers; We investigate mathematical phenomena "because it's there."
Oh, I love your default answer! :)
to anonymous: it's an interesting viewpoint. "exploring" is fine, but the one issue i have is this: in the process of doing mathematics, we often don't know what we're looking for ..
(which among other reasons, contributes to how hard it is, to do mathematics)
.. so how can we say "because it's there" if we don't know if "it" is "there?"
to saara: i think it's a fine answer, but be careful when using it in front of scientists!
they will not believe you, because they have their own assumptions about what mathematics is: a tool for computation and precision.
There's nothing wrong with being useless, nor with the government putting little to no money aside for pure mathemaitcs research.
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