Timeline for Mathematicians learning from applications to other fields
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
32 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 9, 2022 at 12:47 | comment | added | Gil Kalai | What I meant was that finding formulas for solutions of polynomials with radicals was considered over the centuries (perhaps, I am not sure) as an applied question. The fact that this is impossible was a huge contribution to pure mathematics. | |
| May 9, 2022 at 3:55 | comment | added | Michael Hardy | @GilKalai : Can you elaborate on that? Did Galois and others who worked on this expect their work to be primarily of benefit to those in some field other than mathematics? | |
| May 8, 2022 at 19:35 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Asaf Karagila♦ | ||
| May 8, 2022 at 19:16 | comment | added | Gil Kalai | Perhaps the Abel-Ruffini impossibility theorem and Galois theory can be seen in this light. | |
| May 8, 2022 at 17:56 | history | edited | Michael Hardy | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 8, 2022 at 15:59 | comment | added | Amir Sagiv | Does this answer your question? What are some applications of other fields to mathematics? | |
| May 7, 2022 at 16:11 | review | Close votes | |||
| May 9, 2022 at 6:44 | |||||
| May 6, 2022 at 17:25 | comment | added | Sam Hopkins | Although I know basically nothing about this, I believe another example of recent progress in mathematics with origin very much in applications is the area of "compressed sensing": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing | |
| May 6, 2022 at 17:21 | history | edited | Sam Hopkins | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 6, 2022 at 16:39 | history | edited | Michael Hardy | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 6, 2022 at 12:57 | history | protected | Carlo Beenakker | ||
| May 6, 2022 at 8:23 | comment | added | lalala | can you adjust the title? pitching engineers vs "engineers" does not make sense. | |
| May 5, 2022 at 22:17 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @MassimoOrtolano I was an engineer for several years, so I'm speaking from that experience. | |
| May 5, 2022 at 20:32 | comment | added | Massimo Ortolano | @TimothyChow You have a too much stereotypical view of engineers ;-) | |
| May 5, 2022 at 17:54 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @SamHopkins Did the engineers really have a burning desire to understand why the simplex algorithm works so well in practice? That strikes me as something mathematicians are far more interested in than engineers are. Engineers typically care mainly that it works well in practice, not why it works well in practice. To the extent that the engineers care, I would expect that the smoothed analysis of Spielman and Teng would be more than enough to satisfy an engineer. | |
| May 5, 2022 at 15:38 | comment | added | Sam Hopkins | @TimothyChow: fair enough, although I think if you review the history in detail you might see a little more of the "no progress in engineering; lots of progress in math." A cartoon version is: engineers came to mathematicians saying "we have this lovely algorithm for solving linear programs and we want to know why it works." That lead the mathematicians to study all sorts of interesting problems about face numbers of polytopes, etc. But it didn't lead to an answer to the engineering problem: as Gil Kalai often points out, it is still not known why the simplex method works well in practice. | |
| May 5, 2022 at 15:24 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @SamHopkins I might be misinterpreting Michael Hardy's question, but it sounds to me that he's asking for more than examples of "pure math spinoffs from the solution to an applied math problem." The challenge there would be to find examples of math that did not spin off from an applied problem if you go back far enough historically. Rather, I think he wants examples of "math meets engineering, no significant engineering progress is made, but math is greatly enriched by the encounter." Linear programming wouldn't count, then, because it is "too successful" engineering-wise. | |
| May 5, 2022 at 12:52 | comment | added | Trunk | @Narasimham Add Heaviside and Von Mises to that list. Also the many people who discovered statistical distributions that apply in many other areas: Lorentz, Pareto, Fisher, Gauss, etc | |
| May 5, 2022 at 4:14 | comment | added | robert bristow-johnson | this guy. | |
| May 5, 2022 at 3:42 | answer | added | Timothy Chow | timeline score: 13 | |
| May 5, 2022 at 2:16 | history | became hot network question | |||
| May 5, 2022 at 0:39 | comment | added | bof | Substituting economics for "engineering" does the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior qualify? | |
| May 5, 2022 at 0:38 | answer | added | Jorge Zuniga | timeline score: 15 | |
| May 5, 2022 at 0:15 | comment | added | Buzz | There was an Applied Math Colloquium about mathematics in election law around 2000, where the speaker said something somewhat like that. | |
| May 4, 2022 at 21:57 | comment | added | Narasimham | Among others.. Von Karman and Jhukovsky, Fourier, Mohr, KF Gauss contributed to maths propelled from fields of aerodynamics, electrical engineering and structural mechanics/stress analysis, land surveying/geodesy respectively. | |
| May 4, 2022 at 21:48 | comment | added | Sam Hopkins | The simplex method in linear programming motivated a lot of the systematic study of convex polytopes. | |
| May 4, 2022 at 21:42 | comment | added | Margaret Friedland | Related: mathoverflow.net/questions/14782/… | |
| May 4, 2022 at 21:34 | answer | added | Michael Hardy | timeline score: 5 | |
| May 4, 2022 at 21:32 | comment | added | Michael Hardy | @MattF. Examples of interactions between mathematicians and "engineers [promiscuously construed]" in which the benefit of the interaction was more to mathematics than to "engineering [broadly construed]", or at least where mathematical research greatly benefited from the interaction. | |
| May 4, 2022 at 20:08 | answer | added | Carlo Beenakker | timeline score: 16 | |
| May 4, 2022 at 18:34 | comment | added | user44143 | Examples of which phenomenon? (The whole first paragraph sets the stage so vaguely that it is not helpful.) | |
| May 4, 2022 at 18:16 | history | asked | Michael Hardy | CC BY-SA 4.0 |