I agree. When I think about the “mathematician mindset” I think largely about the overwhelming interest in the presence or absence, in some space of interest, of “pathological” entities like the Weierstrass function. The truth or falsehood of “for all / there exists” statements tend to turn on these pathologies or their absence.
How does this relate to optimization? Optimization can make pathological entities more relevant, if
(1) they happen to be optimal solutions, or
(2) an algorithm that ignores them will be, for that reason, insecure / exploitable.
But this is not a general argument about optimization, it’s a contingent claim that is only true for some problems of interest, and in a way that depends on the details of those problems.
And one can make a separate argument that, when conditions like 1-2 do not hold, a focus on pathological cases is unhelpful: if a statement “fails in practice but works in theory” (say by holding except on a set of sufficiently small measure as to always be dominated by other contributions to a decision problem, or only for decisions that would be ruled out anyway for some other reason, or over the finite range relevant for some calculation but not in the long or short limit), optimization will exploit its “effective truth” whether or not you have noticed it. And statements about “effective truth” tend to be mathematically pretty uninteresting; try getting an audience of mathematicians to care about a derivation that rocket engineers can afford to ignore gravitational waves, for example.
I agree. When I think about the “mathematician mindset” I think largely about the overwhelming interest in the presence or absence, in some space of interest, of “pathological” entities like the Weierstrass function. The truth or falsehood of “for all / there exists” statements tend to turn on these pathologies or their absence.
How does this relate to optimization? Optimization can make pathological entities more relevant, if
(1) they happen to be optimal solutions, or
(2) an algorithm that ignores them will be, for that reason, insecure / exploitable.
But this is not a general argument about optimization, it’s a contingent claim that is only true for some problems of interest, and in a way that depends on the details of those problems.
And one can make a separate argument that, when conditions like 1-2 do not hold, a focus on pathological cases is unhelpful: if a statement “fails in practice but works in theory” (say by holding except on a set of sufficiently small measure as to always be dominated by other contributions to a decision problem, or only for decisions that would be ruled out anyway for some other reason, or over the finite range relevant for some calculation but not in the long or short limit), optimization will exploit its “effective truth” whether or not you have noticed it. And statements about “effective truth” tend to be mathematically pretty uninteresting; try getting an audience of mathematicians to care about a derivation that rocket engineers can afford to ignore gravitational waves, for example.