[xanderlewis]

Some have given it a lot of thought, but not nearly as many as I would have expected. Despite such questions being philosophical in nature it seems to mostly be mathematical physicists and applied mathematicians who spend time on it. Pure mathematicians mostly don’t care; they’re not interested in existence or ‘reality’ — if there’s complexity in an idea it’s worth studying whether it has anything to say about models of the universe or not.

I guess what I’m trying to say is just that I’ve always been surprised by the lack of interest most pure mathematicians show towards questions of ‘what exists’ or ‘what the purpose of mathematics is’ and so on. I would have expected such (clearly) intellectually curious people to be less myopic.

Because the world is a big place, one can find countless essays on these sorts of topics. But it’s still a minority sport. John Baez is a brilliant outlier in many ways.

[red_trumpet]

I agree that pure mathematicians might not care about applications. That is simply not their job.

But successful applications of the real numbers are everywhere present in physics, engineering, statistics, and the other natural sciences. The funny thing is that many of those applications don't care either if real numbers represent an aspect of reality. They are a well-enough approximation, and that makes them work.

[xanderlewis]

The job of an academic is, one could say, to wonder about things (and then pursue them with scholarly rigour). So it seems strange to me that academics think of themselves as having such narrowly-defined roles even within their own subject. But I guess the (pragmatic) answer is that to be successful you must keep focused.

Of course, this is opening another whole can of worms that is perhaps starting to become off-topic.

[samus]

As you succinctly said it yourself, pure mathematics is indeed by definition unconcerned about whether their objects of study actually "exist". That's the business of physicists and certain subfields of philosophy.

Pure mathematics has indeed been challenged whether it actually makes sense to further fund it, but occasionally their objects of study turn out to be useful. For example number theory, which is the foundation of modern asymmetric cryptography.

But even if their research never turns out to be useful, pure mathematicians are unconcerned about it since they don't approach their research objects with any assumption regarding that.

[whatisyour]

Because it does not generate very interesting models and becomes extremely and intractably difficulty really fast.

You could write your problem as a discrete system and often that is kind of it. People have tried for a long time and the solution methods to the problems are almost impossible or too expensive.