Thread: I don't particularly enjoy geometry, but this video is pretty interesting.

Hah, don't worry about the practicality. This is topology, which is pure maths. Pointless maths, in other words.

We have the option to do it in the third year... that video was beautiful and I'm sure it's a beautiful area of mathematics, but I'll probably not do it as I need to focus on applied maths which might actually prove some use to humanity.

No offence to pure mathematicians of course. To be honest another important reason is that you have to be far brighter than me to understand any of it.

I have a somewhat similar attitude toward pure math. In fact, one of the reasons that I like statistics and probability so much is that they are inherently applied. Both are relatively new branches of mathematics which were invented specifically in order to solve certain real world problems. (Probability was invented to solve problems in gambling, while modern statistics has an even more interesting story--more reasons to love gambling and beer!) I disliked all of my early math classes. I found them easy but seemingly pointless. Trigonometry in particular was mind numbingly boring. But when I took my first stat course in college, it just made sense. This is consequential stuff that I can use in the real world. Life is uncertainty, and statistics and probability teach us how to tame that uncertainty. Who cares about cosines? (See this 3 minute TED talk for a similar pragmatic view.)

I have to admit though that as I work my way into increasingly advanced areas of statistics, I can see more and more how some of the complex ideas are informed by pure math, particularly calculus. Noticing these relationships makes me wish that I had taken more pure math courses. However, the point remains that I only see these as useful to the extent that they can ultimately be used for statistics and in other applied contexts.

I love doing applied math because it kind of feels like magic. You do all these mystical things with weird symbols and out of the other end comes a piece of knowledge with which you can change the universe.

As far as I know the whole of analysis, for example, is pointless. That's because you spend the whole time wondering whether functions are continuous and things; but in real life, space can always be treated as being continuous, so you can just do whatever you want to an intergral so long as it's obvious.

Originally Posted by Xei

I love doing applied math because it kind of feels like magic. You do all these mystical things with weird symbols and out of the other end comes a piece of knowledge with which you can change the universe.

You put that really nice!

Catbus, I only now realized it's an hemoglobin molecule in your sig. LUL

Also the vid is slow as heck and nearly gave me the bursting spiders to watch. I felt like hitting the guy asking the questions. In any case, it's a nice thing to know.

My favorite protein.

I get excited by pure maths because the progress made is sometimes picked up by others (physicists for example) and used to advance technology.