>>13778508>If nothing, why waste time and resources building computers to find the 52nd perfect numberBecause why not - allowing a discipline that costs the citizen no effort or money to persist and do its own thing by just having funding to have its practitioners be able to lead normal lives and do occasional computer experiments is just a good thing to do, since the discipline is fundamental and highly generative. Governments run massive concert halls, sports events, the Olympics for fucks sake, celebrations and other things, each requiring massively more input and giving massively less output than just one very nice office with some classrooms and computers, books, snacks and basic arrangements for some mathematicians to do their thing. Science is a cheap endeavour in general - even CERN is actually a complete blip on the radar in comparison to what the budget of the EU actually is. I dont need to talk of the economic value produced via scientific progress made since year 1930(which you may as well take to be the entirety of the US, the EU and general GDP. US lives on physics dollars). Knowing literally everything and being able to deeply understand all of it is INCREDIBLY cost efficient in general - no matter if its the country or just you.
>>13780169>Or maybe 1+1=2 is more than a thought of God, and one thing not even Him could change, as Grothendieck reminds us.There is an exotic structure of addition/multiplication on the set with two elements called a semifield - a field with an addition, no subtraction and multiplication and division. There also exists an exotic semifield with char 1 - the semifield 1+1=1 and in fact the only such finite semifield.
Grothendieck would think of something like God seeing all possible structures all at once and disentangling all of them and reconstructing them at less than a breeze. Certainly Grothendieck was a builder of mathematical worlds to frame problems.
