FT.com – Tim Harford [no paywall]: “In the 1970s, some basic ideas in supposedly useless number theory were deployed by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. They developed the RSA algorithm, which enables public key cryptography, without which there would be no ecommerce. Cryptography is hardly valueless to the military, either. One never knows when useless knowledge will be useful after all. Hardy’s number theory was not alone in being accidentally useful. In a famous article published around the same time — “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” (1939) — the head of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Abraham Flexner, made the case for apparently useless research. Flexner started with the radio and the radio telegraph — remarkable inventions for which many people thanked Guglielmo Marconi, the Nobel Prize-winning engineer. Flexner argued that the “real credit” should go to James Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz, who had done the fundamental research. “Neither Maxwell nor Hertz had any concern about the utility of their work,” wrote Flexner, adding that Marconi contributed “merely the last technical detail . . . now obsolete”. Some more recent examples have been gathered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for its Golden Goose awards. Ten years ago, the awards recognised the Honey Bee Algorithm, which began with biologists painting tiny numbers on the backs of chilled (and thus immobile) bees, and then tracking the individual bees to figure out how they contributed to the hive’s search for nectar. Why? Because they wanted to know. A couple of engineers became intrigued, figuring that maybe the bees had evolved a smart mechanism which the engineers might use to . . . well, do something. Perhaps they could use it to smooth the flow of traffic or suchlike. The bees had indeed evolved a clever approach, but the engineers couldn’t work out how to use it….Turns out they could find a use…”