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orochimaaruyesterday at 9:30 PM1 replyview on HN

Not true. Novel mathematical methods precede their application by at least a decade and widespread use by about a century.

Calculus was invented in 1670, it was about 1680-1700 till it started actually being used in astronomy. The uptake was probably faster because at that time a lot of mathematicians were Astronomers as well.

There is a lot of mathematics created but we don’t yet know how to use it. My hope is that AI can bridge the search gap to accelerate this.


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leonvossyesterday at 10:14 PM

Quantitative scientists are also mathematicians. I'm not attacking mathematics, just probably-useless subfields. Is there any good quantitative evidence that actually estimates what percent of math work today will be useful? Because to me it seems like <1% and I feel like we could easily make that number a lot higher. Particularly I want to see massive improvements in quantitative social science; physics already gets a lot of attention so it wouldn't be able to see as much improvement to getting more resources but it could probably still get more.

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