An anonymous 4chan user once solved a 25 year old maths problem, to answer a question about the watch order of an anime. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-surprisingly-...
Iirc, Heisenberg reinvented Matrix calculations to solve a problem in quantum physics. Not being a mathematician, he wasn't aware of the concept. Born recognized what Heisenberg had done and introduced him to his own reinvention.
PBS Space Time released a video with that story yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-Q5r3THR3M
Lots of people working in different fields end up reinventing things that have been known to math for centuries, often in clunky roundabout ways. I imagine some of them figure out things not known to math, but it's far more likely to go the other way.
Folks shouldn’t be afraid to “rediscover” stuff.
Primarily because the learnings you make are the same as the original “discoverer”. Without those learnings, you might not be able to arrive at your true destination.
> Lots of people working in different fields end up reinventing things that have been known to math for centuries
I remember reading, about a year or two ago, about a medical doctor that published a paper rediscovering calculus (I just looked it up, it happened in 1994, there’s been many articles and videos about it)
It's not clear from the Wikipedia article linked below whether she was rediscovering part of calculus or knowingly rebranding it. Do you know more details?
lmao: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai%27s_model
This is such a great story
it's a fact of geographical and social independence.. so far there's no way to know what everybody did or is doing (well there's twitter but it's configured on noise rather than signal)
A lot of the time engineers are focussed with solving a problem, to build a working machine/program, while academics just want to publish.
This is also true with patents.
This particular example may be unlikely, but it's a very fun idea.