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this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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The string theory bit aside, the implications of being an applied mathematics professor is pretty grim: you're going to be known as the one responsible for the application, good or bad, and it's also a pretty different profession from theoretical mathematics. Like, a worse profession.
Say more about this? Why is it a worse profession? Anywhere I can get a layperson-friendly deep dive on this (that doesn't require a graduate degree in mathematics)? I'm fascinated by the nuance between niche academic disciplines and the "politics" of academia.
Don't ask me, man, I used to be an engineer. I figure it's kind of like being a poet and suddenly you're designated as a semantic English Teacher.
Maybe because people get into this kind of very abstract field to escape reality and that would mean reality is catching up on them and reducing their freedom to not have to care about consequences.
AFAIK it is just a form of elitism, where they argue applied science exists only because theoretical scientists "did" something. Like you are just using someone's stuff.
Another thing is theoretical science "indicates" advancement of science, where the applied side is just growth in sideways.
This kind of reductionism is hilariously unscientific.
Many theories were only able to advance after we had the tools to experimentally review them and quite frankly often weed the bad ones out. Modern tools like computing enable the development of theories that before were unimaginable, leaving aside the necessity of modern communication to grow and share knowledge.
Or in other words: Nobody who now writes his theories on chalkboard would have done so with charcoal on a cave wall after hunting mammoths during the day.
applied mathematics can get very messy: it requires performing a bunch of computations, optimizing the crap out of things, and solving tons of equations. you have to deal with actual numbers (the horror), and you have to worry about rounding errors and stuff like that.
whereas in theoretical math, it's just playing. you don't need to find "exact solutions", you just need to show that one exists. or you can show a solution doesn't exist. sometimes you can even prove that it's impossible to know if a solution exists, and that's fine too. theoretical math is focused more on stuff like "what if we could formalize the concept of infinity plus one?", or "how can we sidestep Russel's paradox?", or "can we turn a sphere inside out?", or The Hairy Ball Theorem, or The Ham Sandwich Theorem, or The Snake Lemma.
if you want to read more about what pure math is like, i strongly recommend reading A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart. it is extremely readable (no math background required), and i thought it was pretty entertaining too.