Theoretical Mathematics Quotes
This quotation illustrates one of the major reasons politicians and laymen have difficulty making educational policy on mathematics education. It is the laws that govern mathematics and their structure that is most critical, not the ability to calculate and measure although the latter are important and useful by products.
Shortly thereafte,r he presented a a proof that any sufficiently large integer can be written as a sum of 1046 tenth powers – a fascinating finding that has proved of absolutely no socially utilitarian use. Congress and State Legislators beccome upset when public money is spent on new mathematial advances that don't seem to have any practical utility. However, much abstract mathematics was developed many years before society discovered that they were useful and in many cases invaluable. Also, even when a new mathematical creation never has any utility, it often leads to a more advanced form of mathematics for which there are useful applications.
There are many systems of mathematics which are totally contrary to the world as we know and observe it; others, reflect the world as it is known. The latter we use for science. The former exist only in the mathematics world. We have mathematics today of computers that do not exist, universes that can only be imagined and some that are not even imaginable. Sometimes we realize that a mathematical system we thought had no reflection of reality, was really useful in explaining a new physical phenomenon. What is theoretical today, might need to be applied tomorrow.