[jstx1]

True, as I wrote the calculus example I remembered this post about a medical researcher rediscovering integration - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26384357

But it still feels more like unknown unknowns causing you to put in a lot of extra effort; I wouldn't classify these as productivity multipliers.

[hyperman1]

Back in the day, I saw someone ripping a CD to MP3s. He lazily named the first one 1.mp3, the seconde one 2.mp3 etc. After 9, he found he ran out of numbers. So the next one became ... A1.mp3 !

I always wondered, if he thought this trough a little bit further, he'd independently reinvent the arabic number systems.

[brimble]

Some interfaces will sort 10.mp3 so it's directly under 1.mp3, instead of under 9.mp3. This could be a totally sensible hack to evade that problem.

[aix1]

It even has a name: natural sort order.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_sort_order

[SamReidHughes]

That's actually not so bad. Physicists in the 20's reinvented matrix math.

[Qem]

Interesting? What would be a good reference on this?

[SamReidHughes]

I most recently encountered this fact in The Man from the Future, a recent biography about John von Neumann. (The first half of it, the first 5 or 6 chapters were good, but it goes off the rails after that.)

I think by "physicists" I should have said, Heisenberg. I'm talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_mechanics#Heisenberg's_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenberg's_entryway_to_matri...