Durham University’s student newspaper, Palatinate, interviewed Tom Crawford, Oxford University tutor, also known as maths communicator Tom Rocks Maths, with 100,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel.
A supporter of the campaign, Tom spoke about the importance of pure maths:
“I think it’s incredibly damaging, because the applied maths stuff doesn’t work without the building blocks that come from pure maths […] and we’ll reach a point where applied mathematicians are stuck.
“You can’t immediately see [pure maths’] use, but [it] almost always becomes incredibly important.”
Crawford tells me his favourite example of this comes from looking at Einstein’s work on relativity. “Most people have heard of it, which shows just how far reaching it is as a theory. But for the first hundred years or so, it had no practical use.”
Then the development of GPS came along. If you get maps up on your phone, it would say “you’re in this six mile radius circle without the relativity correction [needed to correct for the speed the GPS satellites move at]”. This was only realised many years after Einstein’s initial discovery, and in the current climate of research needing an immediate impact, Crawford tells me that “it’s unlikely Einstein would have got funding for his work”.
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