Terence Tao

The cutting edge now is they can get videos of your heart or whatever in real time.

So since you're there anyway, I think they will keep you for the same amount of time, but they can extract more data out of you.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, science is just way too broad now.

Maybe 100 years ago, it was possible to have a pretty decent understanding of every corner of science, but that's basically impossible now.

So you have to specialize.

Yeah, it's all mixed together at all times.

You guys figure this out.

Yeah.

All the modern problems in the world are really interdisciplinary.

I think the specialist problems we've kind of solved in the 20th century and the 21st century is all about collaboration.

this should be obvious but let's just so we're all on the same page tell us the difference between pure and applied math pure math is curiosity driven math you know we see patterns in very abstract things like numbers or shapes and we just ask you know does this pattern keep continuing um and it doesn't necessarily um it's not necessarily motivated by any practical application um or maybe it started out that way but people just sort of just kept asking questions

In principle, yes.

That is part of pure mathematics.

It turns out not to lead very far because there basically aren't any interesting patterns there.

Right, except that we know that like 99% of all the numbers in the world have no interesting patterns.

And it's like only a very small fraction of numbers that actually have something detectable going on.

So the fact that pi is part of the 99% is, in retrospect, not exceptionally interesting.

Yeah, it comes from a law of probability called the law of large numbers.

If you pick a number randomly, for every digit you roll a die, a 10-sided die, and you select digits at random, the law of large numbers says that 99% or 99.99% of the time, you never see any patterns.