Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Speaking from a pure maths' perspective here: Frankly, a little bit. I think at the university research level, the academically inclined professors might be a bit tired to be sidelined with the applied ones, especially when the latter are applauded for their industrial cooperation (read research investments) and appliances (read private ownership over publicly funded research). My study mates and I joked about applied math being dirty, but in reality it is more the absence of creativity and rigor that is the problem with applied math in my opinion.
To me, math is all about answering cool questions, sometimes posing even cooler questions in the process. Maybe an appropriate analogy would be whether an artist judges those that make commercials. Exploratory work can take a life of their own that is usually not possible when the format of the answer is predefined. That being said, I do not really judge, I only think that the different expressions are (usually) quite distinct in direction and content. I did not do math for money, though I rely on my mathematical skills for income.
This is such a neat window into a whole different world for me, thank you for writing all this out!
It does sound very much like artists and the whole conversation of who's selling out and who is being true to the art.
It seems to me that we definitely need both types in this world, ones like you who are curious and just want to explode the edges of what we understand for the sake of discovery, and ones who are willing to apply their mathematic knowledge to narrowly defined problems.