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0 pointsgarmaine4y ago0 comments

That's an explanation that only makes sense from the perspective of pure math. Many of us engineers are wholly incapable of caring about the resolution of theoretical problems. Learning how to take a real world problem and map it into the domain of theory is a special skill that is not required for pure math, because it has an intrinsically messy interface into the real world.

I suspect that a pure mathematician would look scornfully at that as a waste of time, as the whole point is the math doesn't depend on the particular instance. An applied mathematician / engineer on the other hand sees no point in the mathematics unless it is manifested in the form of physical problems.

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spekcular4y ago

I don't think mathematicians look scornfully upon people doing the mapping between applied and theoretical domains. On the contrary, I think there's a lot of respect (and perhaps some envy). It's an entirely different set of skills, and a lot of great math has been inspired by applications, which would never have been possible if pure mathematicians worked in isolation. (The respect/envy comes from the fact that most mathematicians don't have those skills but recognize their value.)

I'm thinking in particular of a lot of stuff in mathematical physics and PDEs.

eru4y ago

> I don't think mathematicians look scornfully upon people doing the mapping between applied and theoretical domains. On the contrary, I think there's a lot of respect (and perhaps some envy).

Proper abstract mathematicians view applications not with scorn, but as a challenge to come up with even more abstract math. :)

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