Comment by hyperpape | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hyperpape | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> rejected any notion of utility. It would be fundamentally wrong for you to ask what's the value of solving the Erdős–Hajnal conjecture; the value is that it's solved.

I disagree. Mathematicians care about the utility of a result. It is just that they regard mathematical understanding as a valid type of utility, and that can be arbitrarily far removed from practical utility. But a proof that doesn't help anyone understand anything interesting is not valued. I could go out and define some pointless construction and create proofs about it immediately. It would only matter if I connect it to some other subject of interest within math.

I would argue that mathematical understanding is valuable for extrinsic reasons, but it is true that by the time you're a math grad student, you're usually willing to pursue it for no external purpose.

Although not a mathematician, Daniel Dennett had a wonderful example about higher order truths of "chmess". https://personal.lse.ac.uk/robert49/teaching/ph445/notes/den...

> and that can be arbitrarily far removed from practical utility

In which case it’s ~equivalent to not caring about utility

It seems in mathematics that the utility of a problem is directly correlated with how difficult it is to solve, for some odd reason. If I defined some pointless construction and it turned out to be very difficult to prove, it would automatically over time become considered a "high utility" mathematics problem (again, for some odd reason).

Mathematics is largely just smart people working on pointless puzzles, and only by coincidence do these puzzles turn out to have practical applications (it cannot be predicted). Or I guess all the obviously practical problems in mathematics have already been solved -- we're now in a world where math is rarely the limiting factor for human progress (like it was, say, pre-calculus; was FFT the last significant unblock from math?).

It's such a waste of the best human minds. Or maybe the best human minds are actually doing something else, maybe we only notice the handful of Terence Taos, not the hundreds of people of equal brilliance who realized pure math is pointless and decided to pursue physics, rocketry, or quantitative finance.

Writing that mathematics is a waste is such a hilariously ignorant comment to make on a programming forum.

remarkable also how it's not even greyed out either. I have been downvoted to oblivion for far more defensible claims

> If I defined some pointless construction and it turned out to be very difficult to prove, it would absolutely and automatically over time be considered a "high utility" problem (again, for some odd reason).

Yes and no.

No: There are lots of very hard open problems which are judged to be of little value by mathematicians and hence garner little attention.

Yes: If a conjecture resists proof for a long time, this can indicate that we still have a substantial gap in our understanding. We project utility into an eventual closure of this gap, not into the statement of the concrete conjecture at hand. The gain in understanding is what we actually work for. It just turns out that chasing specific results, even if they are mostly dead ends on their own, is useful for orientation.

The (by now solved) problem by Fermat (for all integers a ≥ 1, b ≥ 1, c ≥ 1, n ≥ 3, the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ does not hold) and the (still open) Collatz conjecture are perhaps good illustrations of this situation.

There was no useful math after 1964? What? Or do you not count the entire field of computer science as math (arguably FFT belongs to computer science too)?

Most fields, in the aggregate, produce a lot of pointless work, but if you judge mathematics by its best examples, as judged by the field itself, and also by the outside intellectual community, it is a coherent body of work (& brilliantly creative). It is not pointless puzzles at all. William Thurston's geometrization theorem, Klein's erlangen program, Witten's work in physics-inspired mathematics, Langlands program, the Grothendieck school of Algebraic Geometry are deep and abiding intellectual achievements of true understanding. If you don't understand the meaning behind this work, it speaks to your ignorance, not to their significance. The "obvious practical problems" are not solved. Fluid Dynamics is wide open. Non-perturbative quantum theories are wide open. Heck, there are open mathematical problems in General Relativity. Dynamical systems are very poorly understood. Go read a book or something.

Your comment is somewhat emotionally charged, but I choose to respond to the overall point as a mathematician. I think it could be true that utility is correlated with difficulty but it is certainly not defined by it.

In pure mathematics, we reason about a world of abstract objects which are considered interesting ab initio. It may be because they arise directly or often from extremely basic operations, they are connected to many other interesting objects, or that they present special and surprising properties. The importance is basically, there is some surprising, interesting, phenomena which occurs in our world which we don't understand and which we seek to understand. Like science but in the non-physical world.

I think if you create a simple to describe system/construction with a property which is extremely difficult to prove. You are creating an object in our world which is basic but have properties which we don't understand (because we can't prove this property). So indeed I believe it would be an interesting thing to study and be of value. I don't see any problems/issues with this. I don't think the only valuable pursuit of humans is to improve the welfare of other humans. I think understanding the world is also valuable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com