Upon further reflection, I don’t think I can justify my claim that these sorts of problems have no connection to reality at all; perhaps a better claim is that these problems are a very inefficient way of making headway on problems that we care about, even if we extrapolate into the far future. But this would be a much subtler and difficult claim to justify, so for now I’m editing my above post to retract this statement. Since you quoted it in your response, people will still have access to it if they care.
I don’t think I can justify my claim that these sorts of problems have no connection to reality at all; perhaps a better claim is that these problems are a very inefficient way of making headway on problems that we care about, even if we extrapolate into the far future.
Upvoted for correctly understanding the issue (even while taking a position opposite to mine).
For what it’s worth, I was extremely surprised that you listed, of all things, enumerative combinatorics (i.e. counting things) as an example of a branch of mathematics with a “tenuous” connection to “reality”.
Upon further reflection, I don’t think I can justify my claim that these sorts of problems have no connection to reality at all; perhaps a better claim is that these problems are a very inefficient way of making headway on problems that we care about, even if we extrapolate into the far future. But this would be a much subtler and difficult claim to justify, so for now I’m editing my above post to retract this statement. Since you quoted it in your response, people will still have access to it if they care.
Upvoted for correctly understanding the issue (even while taking a position opposite to mine).
For what it’s worth, I was extremely surprised that you listed, of all things, enumerative combinatorics (i.e. counting things) as an example of a branch of mathematics with a “tenuous” connection to “reality”.