alt Hacker News> Before approving construction, I would want communities of humans to understand why the design works and what justifies confidence in its safety. I would hope that we all would.
Why would mathematicians be the best at this or even able to contribute? Engineers and physicist seem like a much better choice. Mathematicians tend to not bother with messy things like whats physically possible, or human consequences etc.
Agreed, it's a very strange example. What percentage of tenured academic mathematics researchers or PhD students work on power plant related things? I know there are applied mathematicians who model things like structural integrity of buildings and prove theorems about this and there is deep math in radio communication and electric grid design etc. (graph theory, coding theory etc), but this is just a small part of math.