There have been a number of Scientific discoveries that seemed to be purely scientific curiosities that later turned out to be incredibly useful. Hertz famously commented about the discovery of radio waves: “I do not think that the wireless waves I have discovered will have any practical application.”
Are there examples like this in math as well? What is the most interesting “pure math” discovery that proved to be useful in solving a real-world problem?
Riemann went nuts working on higher dimensional mathematics and linear algebra. At the time there was not a clear use case for math higher than like 3 or 4 dimensions, but he drove himself crazy discovering it anyways. Today, this kind of math underlies all of artificial intelligence