/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.8439175]

What do pure mathematicians actually do? What does mathematics "research" actually involve? Do they just brainstorm shit for months then try to write a proof of it when they get an idea?

[Anonymous No.8439220]

bump

[Anonymous No.8439239]

>>8439175
>dx

>dicks

[Anonymous No.8439355]

I wake up in the morning and the first thing I remember is that I have my goddamn doctorate in mathematics, this results in an immediate rush of endorphins and testosterone which will last for the rest of the day. I then get to work writing down the proofs to the theorems that I solved in my head last night. After that I fuck my 10/10 wife while thinking about my research. I then leave without eating breakfast since I no longer require sustenance. Next follows morning lectures gracing plebs with some invaluable insight into my mind and its firm grasp on the most important field of study in human history. The rest of the I spend developing various mathematical structures on blackboards, the results of which will applied to curing all cancers and building thermodynamically efficient cold fusion reactors. As the day winds down I ponder my surreal existence, I have to dig up my degree to remind myself of the reality that I do in fact have a PhD in mathematics. Finally I fall asleep holding my doctorate and 300k salary slip in my arms.

And then I do it all again.

[Anonymous No.8439380]

>>8439175
Nah.

[Anonymous No.8439401]

None, Pure Mathematicians live a meaningless and boring life until they die

[Anonymous No.8439456]

>>8439355
This pasta never gets old.

Have a free bump for a genuine answer OP.

[Anonymous No.8439462]

I know a guy who used his math degree to research lasers and materials science

but thats not pure math

[Anonymous No.8440902]

>>8439175
>What do pure mathematicians actually do?

Masterbate furiously with meaningless numbers, while claiming that they are smart.

[Anonymous No.8440961]

>>8439175
>What do pure mathematicians actually do?

Nothing of practical value.

[Anonymous No.8441121]

>>8439175
find connections between existing branches of math and use these developments to solve problems.

I talked with someone who just finished their PhD. His dissertation was roughly on this topic:

homotopy is a tool used to tell when two shapes are NOT deformable into each other. This can be a tricky question, because there are infinitely many ways to deform something (just think about mushing around a single piece of string). Homotopy draws lower dimensional objects onto higher dimensional objects and tries to contract them without breaking something. If you can contract a shape (like a loop) on one object, but not the other, that tells you you cannot deform one into the other.

This scales up: how many ways can you draw an n-sphere onto an m-sphere? Turns out it is highly nontrivial (and if you knew how, you would know a lot about the fundamental structure of connected spaces and paths/planes/spheres that can be stretched onto the surface of another). In fact, his dissertation showed that certain computations which give you information about how and when you can do it are connected to solving certain problems in number theory. Since there was already a robust branch of number theory dealing with these structures (roughly, certain functions in the dimensions n and m which behave nicely when the difference between the dimensions is fixed), he could translate results about numbers to results about shape.

He solved a small fragment of the problem this way, and so advances homotopy, and people can now keep hacking at the problem until it is resolved using this trick.

That's just one example, not very applied, but it when it happens all over the world and often, you start to inch towards more effective problems solving methods for more and more general cases.

[Anonymous No.8441131]

They wait until a physicist comes along and realizes that the work is usable.