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by zarzavat
933 days ago
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There’s just something obscene about patenting mathematics. The universe gifts us these truths and our first instinct is that it should be the property of a human. Patents exist to incentivize invention. As long as mathematicians are content to do mathematics for the love of it, and they certainly are, there’s no need for mathematical patents. Practically speaking, mathematical ideas are building blocks not products. Patents on mathematical ideas discourage invention rather than encouraging it because they prevent use of that idea in new products - an idea that would have been discovered anyway. For example the parents of elliptic curve cryptography and arithmetic coding were hugely damaging to invention overall. Patenting a new kind of cork screw doesn’t have this problem, it’s a destination, not an intermediate. |
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Math can be viewed as a product of how our minds work. We use abstractions to understand and predict the universe, but it's always imperfect, and the theories always incomplete.
E g., you'd think 1+1=2 is some universal truth, except integers don't exist in nature, being just another abstraction that we came up with. And of course, people can rediscover integers repeatedly, but that just says more about how our mind works.
And yes, math is a building block, but so is software. If math theories aren't patentable, that should happen based on them being trivial or perhaps being too useful to society, and not due to some romantic notions of discovery and the universe. Software, too.