Comments by "Mat Broomfield" (@matbroomfield) on "Monster Group (John Conway) - Numberphile" video.

  1. Can someone please explain to me why anyone would spend any time at all studying the monster group, much less dedicating their lives to it? What benefits does it have in the real world?
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  2. TheMotU There's a difference between data and knowledge. To me, this appears to be just data.
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  3. Imafungi123 But skateboarding has demonstrable benefits - it's entertaining in the first place, and judging by this man's demeanour, a lifetime in maths, much less studying this group is anything BUT entertaining. Furthermore skateboarding keeps me fit, and it's social. And it has achievable goals that don't require five lifetimes to accomplish. 
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  4. ***** There are tangible benefits in conquering our planet, or ourselves. Commercial rewards, physical benefits. As Phil pointed out, there MAY be methodological benefits in understanding the monster set, but cracking it seems to me to be along the same lines as spending decades trying to calculate the largest prime - a massive misuse of time that could be spent a gazillion times better, even within the same discipline, because the end result is not some massive breakthrough or contribution to the science, But thank you for your comment.
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  5. mdiem Did I say that mathematics was not useful? I asked about this specific problem. To spend your entire life trying to unravel some possibly non-existent properties of a single super-large group of numbers,  when the solution appears to have no application to anything, given that there are an infinite number of mathematical conundrums that actually advance the discipline seems like a supreme waste of effort to me - even for recreational purposes. I thought that perhaps I was missing some deeper purpose to this set, but looking at the answers, that doesn't seem to be the case.
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  6. Joni Hanski I dunno, I think that  there's an elegant beauty and a deep functionality to some areas of mathematics. I just didn't see the application of this particular area. 
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  7. jamma246 I agree very much with the  political message you included there. but  perhaps mankind is hardcoded to work towards that which is directly useful. Perhaps in much harsher times, the humans that spent their time on trivia were the one who didn't eat. It seems that utilitarianism is one of our most fundamental imperatives?
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