Grant Sanderson: belief

Transcript context

…This actually is an interesting question I wasn't planning on asking you but it just occurred to me. Is it surprising how new a lot of mathematics is? Even mathematics that is taught at the high school level. Whereas with physics or biology, that's also new but you can tell a story where we didn't have the tools to look at the cell or to inspect an electron until very recently but we've had mathematicians for 2000-3000 years, who were doing pretty sophisticated things, even the ancient Greeks. Why is linear algebra so new given that fact? I wouldn't have thought of math as being new in that way, especially at the high school level. I remember there's always a sensation that it's frustrating that all of the things are actually way more than a hundred years old, in terms of the names attached to the theorems that you're doing, none of them are remotely modern. Whereas in biology, the understanding we have for how proteins are formed is relatively much more modern and you might be just a couple generations away. To some extent there's a raw manpower component to it. How many people did pure math for most of history? For most of history, no one. No one was a pure mathematician. They were a mathematician plus something else or they were a physicist or they were a natural philosopher. And in so far as you're doing natural philosophy, one component of that is developing math but it's not the full extent of what you do. Even the ones who we think of as like very, very pure mathematicians in the sense that a lot of their most famous results are pure math like Gauss, actually a lot his output was also centered on very practical problems, Maybe since then is when you start to get an era of something more like pure mathematicians. The raw number available that you have the man hours that are being put into developing new theorems, is probably just got this huge spike as the population grows and then also the percentage of the population that has the economic freedom to do something as indulgent as academia grows. Maybe it's pretty reasonable that most of it is much, much more recent. That would be my guess. Some of these things seem actually pretty modern like information theory. It is less than 100 years old and is pretty fundamental. Theoretically, you could have written that paper a long time ago.…

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