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List:       cryptography
Subject:    Re: [Cryptography] "Public Accountability vs. Secret Laws: Can They Coexist?"
From:       Jerry Leichter <leichter () lrw ! com>
Date:       2018-07-21 4:44:49
Message-ID: 01829011-96BB-4E0D-A985-FFCD268CA5A2 () lrw ! com
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> > It's not a lack of common sense, it's what you need to do to get a paper
> > published.  If you have a neat idea you can't just publish it because it's
> > a neat idea, you have to have some problem for it to solve.  So you invent
> > a problem and then publish your idea as the solution to it [0]
> 
> I've not generally seen this be the case in mathematics. A lot of
> subfields do not have any direct application. You can formulate
> solutions like "find X in Y better than Z" but maybe X and Y haven't
> been linked to any physical phenomena.
Fields of inquiry define their own standards for what makes an acceptable paper.  \
Mathematics long ago separated itself from practical applications.  (Though there \
have been some partial exceptions.  During the Soviet era, there was a push to show \
that work could actually be applied.  I recall once seeing a translation of a Russian \
text on, I think, functional analysis.  This is highly theoretical stuff - and most \
of the book was as well.  But then the last couple of chapters applied some of the \
theory to engineering analyses of concrete shells.  How widespread this kind of thing \
was, I don't know - but there was some really good mathematics done in the SU in \
those days.)

There's a whole field of "applied mathematics" (which overlaps with "numerical \
analysis" in uncertain ways) in which work is expected to have practical application \
- though of course sometimes that's a stretch anyway.  (I know of at least one \
respected practitioner who refuses to call himself an "applied mathematician" because \
he thinks most of the work done under that rubric is neither usefully applied nor \
good mathematics.)

Cryptography as a field started off heavy on the practical applications - but any \
field with a strong mathematical component will inevitably feel a pull toward \
abstraction which will result in papers judged on some mathematical notion of \
elegance rather than practical application.  The same occurs, of course, throughout \
theoretical computer science.

Two stories, both from many years back:
1.  I knew a bunch of guys working on functional languages.  They were working on \
some algorithm for a compiler - I think some kind of type resolution - and were very \
happy one day to announce that they'd gotten the algorithm down to only doubly \
exponential time complexity. 2.  At some STOC or FOCS, there was a "rump session" \
talk announced with the title "Application of VLSI Theory to VLSI Practice".  The \
speaker came up, put up a slide with that title, stood for a bit, moved to his next \
slide - which was completely blank; stood for a bit more; then bowed, thanked the \
audience and sat down.  Much laughter and applause ensued.

                                                        -- Jerry

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