In this thread with @johncarlosbaez I was mentioning how when I first encountered Category Theory it seemed like little more than a curiosity (for my purposes, as a physicist), even though mathematicians seemed excited about it.

I had almost the opposite experience with Nonstandard Analysis (i.e. the hyperreal numbers), in the sense that I bumped into this notion, read a bit about it, and it sounded potentially quite useful. Physicists tend to talk in terms of infinitesimals anyway, so a framework where that could be done rigorously seemed useful, and I was curious if it might provide nice ways to think about other things such a path integrals or even renormalization. But the only mathematician I talked to about it dismissed it as basically a curiosity. I believe the way he put it was that it was "just a trick to avoid an extra quantifier in in proofs."

Now I'm curious if that is the consensus among the #physics and #mathstodon folks around here or if people see it as a practically useful tool.
#math #maths