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Ah I see. As we evolve our understanding and toolset of certain fields in math, we may serendipitously happen upon approaches to solve existing problems or solve future ones, perhaps.


As one example, number theory was considered pure math with no real-world applications for a long time. But then cryptography became a thing…


Cryptography and coding theory.

Cryptography and coding theory and compression are three sides of the same (generalised) coin. Claude Shannon dabbled in all of them.

See eg https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~twk/Shan.pdf




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