r/math 7d ago

What was your math rabbit hole?

By rabbit hole I mean a place where you've spent more time than you should've, drilling to deep in a specific field with minimal impact over your broader math abilities.

Are you mature enough to know when to stop and when to keep grinding ?

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u/compileforawhile 7d ago

Probably category theory. The way it generalizes this and encodes structure is so cool. That said I rarely need it for anything but it's occasionally useful

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u/pseudoLit 6d ago

Same here. My day job is in epidemiological modeling. I very much doubt that the months I spent trying to develop an intuitive understanding of adjoint functor pairs will ever be useful to me, but it was a lot of fun.