/sci/ - Science & Math

How useful are elliptic curves?

>>10740297
While ultimately a lot of things can be used "in the real world", in the pure math world, these things tend to come after-the-fact, or inadvertently, or simply never. For example, consider the problem in pic related. It asks you to find whole number solutions to three quantities of fruits satisfying the equation in the pic. While this may seem at first glance like a distribution problem, that is, finding the "right" amount of food to give to each person or something of the like, there is no real-world scenario where such a relation might really come up, at least within the context of whole number solutions. There is no easy way to solve this problem, and the first solutions that might come up are in the hundreds of digits; quantities higher than there are atoms in the observable universe. How to solve such a problem (that is, finding all possible whole number solutions), is a typical problem of pure math. There is no reason as to why this might be helpful, or interesting, but solving it is in an of itself an interesting endeavour to some people. A typical solution might have to delve into the theory of elliptic curves, which is a classical pure math topic that has only recently (past 30 years or so) acquired a use through encryption problems, however, its development was completely independent to its application to the real world.

This is just stupid. The whole point of the meme is to give seemingly elementary problems that can be expressed using only the 4 elementary operations. If you start putting advanced notation like cot and limits and [math]\mathbb Z[/math], it loses it's memetic potential. For example, pic related is completely elementary, and although retards keep thinking either one
>this can't be solved, there's three unknowns and 1 equation xP, or
>a solution is obviously 1, 0 and some irrational number of bananas hurr durr xD
this is exactly what the meme is about.

only genius can solve

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