| Pure mathematics doesn't always have an immediately known use, but it has historically been at the core of science. In the words of Carl Friedrich Gauss: "Mathematics is the queen of the sciences." While there are often cash prizes and prestige for solving great mathematical problems, it is also studied simply for the beauty of mathematics and for the desire to make new discoveries. For example, algorithms eventually found their way into computers, number theory became essential to cryptography, set theory gave us fields and therefore quantum mechanics and modern electronics. Mathematicians create theories and proofs just for the sake of mathematics. Pythagoras might have been seen as strange by his ancient contemporaries for spending his time calculating the area of squares along the sides of right triangles, but his theorems have proven essential to the progress of humanity Strangely enough, soap bubble geometry has been a subject of interest in analog computing. Some suggest that soap films are more efficient than computers in some cases for finding proofs about surface systems. Topology has wide-reaching application from computing and electronics to physics and game theory. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-soap-film-an-a... |