The Importance of Applications

I am an epistemological purist in that I reckon, I mean, right, I come from pure mathematics. So it's very dangerous to use the criterion of, you know, is there a direct application? How about you just do it to elevate the human spirit and then we'll worry about the rest. We owe it to ourselves to explore everything. 50% of the gross national product of the United States was based on curiosity driven fundamental research a decade or not a decade a generation earlier. If we wanted to build faster computers in the 1940s, we would have gotten wheels - but they invented the transistor which made them obsolete.

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