Do you find some mathematical activities useless?

[pier4r]

(04-07-2018 04:57 AM)Gerald H Wrote:  What country were they discovered in? Were they lying on the surface or buried in the earth? Were they situated in a larger body of maths artefacts?

An answer could be:
There is the universe. There are the law of universe that allow everything that happens, also thinking. One cannot do or think something that is not allowed to happen (looking at you Parmenides. I understood you years later!). So "math" (or whatever one thinks) can be thought because the universe allows the possibility to think about it. Therefore every new thought or action or what not is a discovery of a possibility that was there (maybe all the time) but no one did it until then.
The same could be applied to "oh X invented the engine". No, "X discovered the concepts and the procedures to build an engine that were there waiting for someone since - well we don't know"

You can see it as "I discovered a new lake" if you abstract and think about concepts and activities about the map of possibilities that one can do.
I remember that the same concept was exposed way better by Montesquieu around 1700 in the persian letters.

Of course, as slide rule mentioned, this is one possible perspective.

Anyway the topic was about what you think about some mathematical activities.