What is the point of studying maths at a very high level?

[SW VandeCarr]

What do you get when you divide a mathemetician by a physicist, and then raise that sum to the power of a cosmologist?

You divide a mathematician by a physicist and you get a sum?

 

[micromass]

You divide a mathematician by a physicist and you get a sum?

Yeah, what he said makes no sense. That's why I said the answer was a philosopher, cause they tend to not make sense.

 

[collinsmark]

Here is this week's Abstruse Goose. It seems somewhat relevant to this thread. When I first saw (the strip) yesterday, I wasn't going to post it here. But today? Oh, what the heck.

Impure Mathematics

[Source: http://abstrusegoose.com/504]

[With mouse-over: There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not someday be applied to the phenomena of the real world --- Nicolai Lobachevsky]

 

[VertexOperator]

Yeah, what he said makes no sense. That's why I said the answer was a philosopher, cause they tend to not make sense.

Impure Mathematics

lololol

 

[DiracPool]

"I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh." Thomas Mann

This sounds like a good argument NOT to study mathematics. Darn, just when I was starting to enjoy differential equations.

 

[AlephZero]

You divide a mathematician by a physicist and you get a sum?

True story about the difference between a mathematican working as an engineer (me!) and a physicist who really wanted to be a mathematian (my boss).

I had written the specifcation for putting some new gizmo into a finite element analysis code, full of details of numerical integration, how to evaluate Jacobians, etc.

It came back from my boss with the comment "You could make this a lot shorter by <insert half a page of divs, grads, curls, and double and triple integrals here>"

So I sent a note back saying "OK, but if this is a spec for a computer program, how would you actually write the code"?

The answer: "You do it your way, of course".

 

[ilmareofthemai]

For most of the mathematicians I know, in one way or another, their interest in math comes down to its aesthetic quality. Doing math because you find it beautiful or because you like the way it makes you think seems like a perfectly rational decision to me.

Agree!
I recently read A Universe in Zero Words, a book about the history and influence of important equations (if you want some examples of crazy mathematicians, read the chapter about the types of infinities-the outcome for a couple of those mathematicians, i.e. Godel, was not so great) and developed a strong appreciation for mathematics, especially geometry. A great read.
Also, as someone else mentioned, math and physics sometimes develop at different rates, and the math Pauli needed was already developed, etc. For more examples, read Euclid's Window, a book about the major mathematical revolutions and their connections with physics. Is mathematics inherent, or a construct? It has to do with the definition but maybe we'll never know...It has already been proven that math can't be proven (Universe in Zero Words)!