There have been a number of Scientific discoveries that seemed to be purely scientific curiosities that later turned out to be incredibly useful. Hertz famously commented about the discovery of radio waves: “I do not think that the wireless waves I have discovered will have any practical application.”
Are there examples like this in math as well? What is the most interesting “pure math” discovery that proved to be useful in solving a real-world problem?
Damn, I thought we were going philosophical but nevermind that then. I agree sometimes complex numbers are thought of as weird which they certainly shouldn’t be. 2D numbers are not a great name though coz (x,y) rather than (x,iy) is what comes to mind. Maybe we should just stop using imaginary. Complex or quaternions are enough.