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Comment by nrr | Hacker News Reader

I might be biased, but everything under the Division of Mathematical Sciences in the MPS directorate is important. Math is one of those weird fields that tends to touch everything else even if not directly, and it's impossible to know prima facie which areas of research will be useful downstream to the sciences and engineering.

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Most of the important maths research is funded by the Department of War. NSF is a good chunk, I'd have to look it up, but I wouldn't be concerned about this at all. Math is important for the war planners, always has been always will be.

Thanks for sharing. I don't work on weapons as a matter of deep conviction, so I'll continue to be concerned about this.

My point is math is a weapon.

Forgive me, but I don't exactly follow. This isn't obvious to me.

No worries. Sufficient encryption, or encryption breaking, technology trends toward behavior as a weapon. As such, the military is highly, highly interested in mathematics generally, and cryptography specifically. There's a ton of really fun and riveting history there, if you're interested. For a long time, "encryption" to a certain degree was export controlled, but that's not really how it works today. The point is, you cannot have effective cyberweapons without extremely sophisticated ... math.

Oh, I mean, I'm fully aware of the emphasis on codebreaking and on areas like operations research that provide optimization tools for tacticians, not to mention the ITAR restrictions on crypto export.

(I was there when only 40-bit SSL was unrestricted! I very much remember those days! They sucked!)

I guess the hangup I have is that my forays into areas like differential geometry and algebraic topology are extremely abstract, and I cannot control anyone who isn't me who misuses those tools in decidedly not-sober ways. I can only make sure that I don't have a direct hand in that kind of misuse.

I can go for that, as long as the research proposals are actually about math research.

The stuff in Airtable seems to be. The lion's share of what's there is research that has applications to, like, sensors and robotics and AI, even if the abstracts themselves don't state that, likely because the PIs behind those proposals aren't aware of those applications of their work.

(Just to illustrate how mathematicians can sometimes embody the archetype of Hans Guck-in-die-Luft: I had someone tell me once that there were no applications of ODEs or PDEs to the sciences or engineering.)

> Hans Guck-in-die-Luft

I have to upvote you just for that reference!

My mom tore out Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher, thinking it would be disturbing to my young mind.

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