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Comment by Suppafly | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people working in different fields end up reinventing things that have been known to math for centuries, often in clunky roundabout ways. I imagine some of them figure out things not known to math, but it's far more likely to go the other way.

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Folks shouldn’t be afraid to “rediscover” stuff.

Primarily because the learnings you make are the same as the original “discoverer”. Without those learnings, you might not be able to arrive at your true destination.

>Folks shouldn’t be afraid to “rediscover” stuff.

Luckily no one is suggesting that.

A lot of people suggest that. So many that it has become an idiom. "Don't reinvent the wheel."

> Lots of people working in different fields end up reinventing things that have been known to math for centuries

I remember reading, about a year or two ago, about a medical doctor that published a paper rediscovering calculus (I just looked it up, it happened in 1994, there’s been many articles and videos about it)

lmao: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai%27s_model

This is such a great story

It's not clear from the Wikipedia article linked below whether she was rediscovering part of calculus or knowingly rebranding it. Do you know more details?

it's a fact of geographical and social independence.. so far there's no way to know what everybody did or is doing (well there's twitter but it's configured on noise rather than signal)

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