Ask Lemmy

My disclaimer: I don't know what any of this means, but it might give you a direction to start your research.

First thing he came up with is Number Theory, and how they've been working on that for centuries, but they never would have imagined that it would be the basis of modern encryption. Multiplying a HUGE prime number with any other numbers is incredibly easy, but factoring the result into those same numbers is near impossible (within reasonable time constraints.)

He said something about knot theory and bacterial proteins, but it was too far above my head to even try to relay how that's relevant.

Origami can be used as a basis for geometry:

http://origametry.net/omfiles/geoconst.html

IIRC, you can do things that are impossible in standard Euclidean construction, such as squaring the circle. It also has more axioms than Euclidean construction, so maybe it's not a completely fair comparison.

The exact example I also thought of from the question! Well done

Doom absolutely counts!

This talk by Freya Holmer on Quarternions is awesome and worth anybody’s time that like computer graphics, computer science, or just math.

I wonder if complex numbers predate the discovery of electromagnetism

A complex number is just two real numbers stitched together. It's used in many areas, such as the Fourier transform which is common in computer science is often represented with complex numbers because it deals with waves and waves are two-dimensional, and so rather than needing two different equations you can represent it with a single equation where the two-dimensional behavior occurs on the complex-plane.

In principle you can always just split a complex number into two real numbers and carry on the calculation that way. In fact, if we couldn't, then no one would use complex numbers, because computers can't process imaginary numbers directly. Every computer program that deals with complex numbers, behind the scenes, is decomposing it into two real-valued floating point numbers.

It's used extensively in electronic circuit design (where it's called "j", as "i' already meant electronic current).

Also signal processing has i or j all over it.

I’m the akshually guy here, but complex numbers are the combination of a real number and an imaginary number. Agree with you, just being pedantic.

Electromagnetics as well.

A good friend of mine from high school got his physics PhD at University of Texas and went on to work in the high energy plasma physics lab there with the Texas Petawatt laser, and a lot of the experiments it was used for involved plasma turbulence and determining what path energetic particles would take in a hypothetical fusion reactor.

prime number factorization is the basis of assymetric cryptography. basically, if I start with two large prime numbers (DES was 56bit prime numbers iirc), and multiply them, then the only known solution to find the original prime numbers is guess-and-check. modern keys use 4096-bit keys, and there are more prime numbers in that space than there are particles in the universe. using known computation methods, there is no way to find these keys before the heat death of the universe.

Maybe they're scared that project Cybersyn would actually work

I'd like to read up on this if you have sources

That's pretty interesting. Do you happen to have any introductory material to that topic?

I mean, it might even have applications outside of running a techno-communist nation state. For example, for designing economic simulation game mechanics.