Applied Mathematics: The Least Accountable Discipline

Applied mathematics has very little in the way of accountability.

Pure mathematicians aren’t in the business of checking applied versions of math (it wouldn’t be interesting, and most manipulation rules are known by end of high school).

That leaves the connections between mathematical expressions and nature’s phenomena. Who is checking these? There is no framework for such a validation, and no applied scientist ever questions math they haven’t seen.

Regarding the applied model, the pure mathematician can only say “sure, I guess” as if some analogy was being stretched to the extreme but maybe it’s valid, while applied scientists (other peers) will assume math adds rigor and leave it at that.

Applied mathematics benefits from 2-sided ignorance, since both sides of its mixed discipline cannot validate what has been created.

None of this, alone, makes applied mathematics invalid, but it does highlight its free pass in science, and raises the fact (with statistical certainty) that there must be a lot of published nonsense in the annals of science.