<story><title>Mathematicians find hidden structure in a common type of space</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-find-hidden-structure-in-a-common-type-of-space-20230412/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hilbert42</author><text>I was just pondering whether this result would eventually be useful to physics or science generally in say ways like Galois&amp;#x27; ideas and Group Theory eventually became useful. Just a thought.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Paul-Craft</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s a good question.  I certainly am not willing to rule it out.  If you had asked me 20 years ago if I thought algebraic topology was going to be of any use to physics, I&amp;#x27;d have probably just laughed the question off.  In retrospect, that seems a bit naive, since the Standard Model, mathematically speaking, is just setting up a Lie group and its corresponding group algebra, then turning some algebra cranks see what comes out, but I&amp;#x27;m not so sure I knew that back then.&lt;p&gt;Someone once told me that mathematicians are frequently doing &amp;quot;the science of 100 years from now.&amp;quot;  I hope we don&amp;#x27;t have to wait that long to find out if design theory has a place in the Theory of Everything.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;physics.stackexchange.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;1603&amp;#x2F;applications-of-algebraic-topology-to-physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;physics.stackexchange.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;1603&amp;#x2F;application...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Mathematicians find hidden structure in a common type of space</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-find-hidden-structure-in-a-common-type-of-space-20230412/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hilbert42</author><text>I was just pondering whether this result would eventually be useful to physics or science generally in say ways like Galois&amp;#x27; ideas and Group Theory eventually became useful. Just a thought.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sthomer</author><text>The paper is way over my head, but it seems to be an important result in the field of finite geometry, i.e. linear algebra over finite fields.  Finite geometry often provides the mathematical foundations for error-correcting coding schemes that are found in many applications where information needs to be transferred efficiently and robustly.  So, I could guess that this result would have practical applications in at least that domain.  However, since that domain is so important (e.g. packet transfer underlying the internet), this could be a very important paper indeed, even for &amp;quot;real-world&amp;quot; applications.</text></comment>