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fn-moteyesterday at 6:15 PM1 replyview on HN

Parent seems to conflate “abstract” with “useless”. This comment addresses the “abstract” part only.

> Math Theory are patterns of abstraction that may never be useful at all or representative of reality.

This is a complete misunderstanding of (good) mathematical research.

The results look abstract, but they are based on concepts that are real and have truth or falsehood.

One example that comes to mind (sorry, technical): is it possible that all maps from a high dimensional sphere to a three dimensional sphere (S^2) might form a group that is not even finitely generated?

This is not just “abstract nonsense”, but understanding any of this takes effort.


Replies

tsunamifuryyesterday at 11:15 PM

Abstraction is useless until its proves use in test against a base case of reality.

its the defition of useless most of the time.