> same could be said of Software
Sort of. An elegant proof is useful beyond what it shows. It hints at new mathematics, and can prompt discovery in applied fields. I don’t think I’ve heard of elegant code leading to discovery on its own.
Sort of. An elegant proof is useful beyond what it shows. It hints at new mathematics, and can prompt discovery in applied fields. I don’t think I’ve heard of elegant code leading to discovery on its own.
Every software design pattern came from elegant code. People wrote code, summarize code, learnt from code, and taught code. That's discovery
I’ve not heard of it either, but code is an abstraction of math, so I don’t see why this couldn’t theoretically happen.
Anecdotally, I’ve started spending time advancing my math skills beyond the early college level I stopped at and I’ve frequently found I already know concepts of more advanced math - I just didn’t know what they were called or how to apply them to an equation on paper, but I’ve been using them for years and intrinsically grasped the underlying academics.
Usually it's the opposite. "That's in prod? And it works? It shouldn't work and I thought it was doing something else. Why does it work?"