What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?

Kanban comes from the automotive industry, and works really well in the tech industry. The Toyota Production System is a brilliant set of principles and practices that fit well in most industries. Toyota sent engineers to optimize street kitchens some years ago.

ISO 9001 was implemented in manufacturing, and is quite popular in many circles of hell.

The black-scholes model for pricing options had a big impact on the financial industry, and the big breakthrough for solving the equation was to realize it could be turned into the heat equation that already had a solution. If I remember well, the insight came to Robert Merton, an economist who had also studied engineering mathematics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%E2%80%93Scholes_model

Breath of knowledge is certainly useful. I'm sure there's a lot of redundant work across domains in universities, but here's a somewhat humorous example of someone recreating the trapezoidal method of approximating the area under a curve. They needed it in a medical context, and anyone who has done Calc 2 would tell you "that's an integral". It shows 402 citations on Google Scholar.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=18129095207210817...

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover...

Contrary to popular belief problems solved in unrelated domains are very common in invention and innovation but people just hate to admit them, hopefully in the near future someone can honestly write a book on it.

One of the most prolific scientists Albert Einstein had his single most productive year while working as a patent officer (Annus Mirabilis). I strongly suspect that he learned quite a lot from many patent applications, journal papers and books that he was required to read during his daily job, thus getting excellent and novel ideas from seemingly unrelated patents and discoveries.

The classic modern example (sorry for the oxymoron terminology) is how a patented signal processing technique of radio astronomy research by CSIRO solved the wireless multi-path propagation problem that enabled wireless revolution from WiFi to 4G/5G.

CSIRO's patent leads to the wireless OFDM invention that allows for much higher communication bandwidth especially on wireless environment where unmitigated multi-path interference is a deal breaker. But of course wireless people just hate to admit it [1].

[1]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/how-the-aussie-g...

A Hospital Races To Learn Lessons Of Ferrari Pit Stop

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB116346916169622261

Knowledge from pit stop procedures improves speed and decreases accidents in hospital settings.

I'm not sure if it is possible to pinpoint the specific point of crossover, but the analysis of crowd dynamics owes a lot to the study of fluid dynamics, and the counterintuitive insight that placing an obstacle like a column in front of an exit can smooth out and speed the outflow of people by adding some turbulence (preventing the jams that can crush people) is one specific example that I recall.

Ada Lovelace developed general purpose computer programming from her understanding of the encoding method implemented by the Jacquard loom.

https://www.irenebrination.com/irenebrination_notes_on_a/201...

If you look in the field of network analysis there’s several camps of researchers, namely: physicists, sociologists, mathematicians and computer scientists all solving the same problems but from different domains with different terms and drawing from different prior work. They all interestingly converge in the sub field of community detection or graph clustering.

Natural selection led to evolutionary optimization algorithms Statistical mechanics to boltzmann machines, ising model to perceptron

A real popular one would be QR codes. They were initially created to track manufacturing processes in the automotive industry. And you know how it is these days...

Have you seen the 1978 series "Connections" from James Burke? History of science and technology is full of these.

A bit late to the party, but: Statistics and Robotics, Statistics and Digital Communications.

Many filters in Robotics (Kalman Filter, Particle Filter) and many concepts in digital communication (Modulation Schemes, Filters, ...) are firmly rooted in statistics and require a decent applied understanding of the area.

This may not be specific enough, but Elon Musk seems to have brought a software-engineering-like perspective to both SpaceX and Tesla, although the latter hasn't been an unqualified success in all respects, applying rapid iteration to a product and process while the process is running at scale has caused occasional blips: https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-y-owners-have-found-home-de...

We sometimes refer to software systems as held together with spit and baling wire, but it's never literally true.

Others have noted the general influence in the opposite direction of the Toyota Production System on software engineering methodologies (most notably in that family of processes labeled "Lean"), but it is pretty clear Tesla could have stood to take a bit more direct influence from TPS on their assembly line.

We haven't seen anything like that at SpaceX (despite much armchair prognostication), but then, even as they ramp up production and launches, each rocket is still somewhat a bespoke product, and no one is going to get in trouble for holding up the production schedule when a problem is noted. Each rocket is still very much a pet, rather than cattle. It remains to be seen if the pace of iteration will slack off (or start conforming to a more regular punctuated cadence) as SpaceX continues to ramp up their capacity.

The approach to safety in the aviation industry is all about learning from mistakes. Whereas in Healthcare it is often more about winning an inevitable legal battle.

There have been a few efforts recently to try and apply aviation safety lessons to healthcare.

Interesting story on it here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02x3vwh

It's a good question. It can be quite infuriating to watch people build inferior monstrosities to solve problems that have well known and efficient solutions. I see examples everywhere of engineers trying to design custom algorithms for problems that can be trivially solved using linear programming or constraint programming. Not that custom algorithms can't beat generalized solvers...just that you aren't likely going by to be the person that designs it when you're a mid level engineer on a time budget and haven't researched any related work.

Beyond that, I think cross breeding some insights from other fields could bring some efficiency improvements to problems that are squarely in the domain of computer science. OS scheduling, for example, has plenty of related people/materials scheduling parallels in the Operations Research field, and possibly some in Auction Theory as well. Same for load balancing (e.g. The Min Cost Multi-Commodity Flow problem).

Frances Arnold, 2018 Nobel laureate for Chemistry, pioneered the use of directed evolution, which she conceived as an iterative lab process, to create enzymes with improved and/or novel functions, e.g. bacteria that produce the biofuel isobutanol.

FRANCES H. ARNOLD Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018

https://www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/stories/fr...

Exploring protein fitness landscapes by directed evolution

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2997618/

Medical MRIs came out of the technology for radio astronomy:

https://armaghplanet.com/astronomy-magnetic-resonance-imagin...

Not completely unrelated fields but the Chen-Simons theory is a quantum field theory named after mathematicians Shiing-Shen Chern and James Simons(founder of Renaissance Technologies) who introduced the Chern-Simons form.

Maybe control version? From software to a lot of other information industries.

Also, not an industry, but I think that some mathematicians use category theory to translate insights from one domain to other.

(Trying the recipe itself here to find a meta-recipe) I think an insight itself from category theory to a more general recipe could be: don't try to move "laterally" to other industry, but go first "up" from a specific solution to a more general interpretation, and see what more you can solve "down" from there.

Second order differential equations, they seem to pop up everywhere. Particularly relevant to classical mechanics. Also gives rise to the metal model of second order consequences of actions.

The concept of bootstrapping. How to start something from nothing that eventually becomes self sustaining.

Compound interest and exponential growth. Particularly relevant to investing as well as the personal ‘growth’ mentality. The natural exponent that was discovered from compound interest is everywhere in mathematics and physics.

Duck tape:

Originally came from the thought that seals on ammo boxes would cost soldiers precious time on the battlefield.

Today it's used for seal and repair in everyday life.

Space & rocket science research needed some speciality materials research, and led to heart valves replacement materials.

Paul Bach-y-Rita used a grid of electrodes to stimulate the tongue, enabling a form of vision in blind people.

Seeing With The Tongue – Paul Bach-Y-Rita –

http://antonyhall.net/blog/seeing-with-the-tongue-paul-bach-...

Zachary's Karate Club [1] was one of the early social networking approaches for identifying an eventual split in organization.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachary%27s_karate_club

Hedy Lamarr developed frequency-hopping, the forerunner of spread-spectrum communications used in WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth, to control torpedoes in a way that avoided jamming by the Nazis, from her understanding of George Antheil's symphonic use of pianola rolls to synchronise multiple player pianos.

https://www.wired.com/2011/08/0811hedy-lamar-george-antheil-...

Hospitality and Healthcare

Some of the "top" hospitals in the US are downright miserable to go to as a patient.

Well, one classic is "Tai's formula is the Trapezoidal rule" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7677819/

Where do you draw the line? Econophysics takes the natural science physics and tries to solve economic problems with it. There's also some application in the finance sector.

Graph theory - organic chemistry

I wonder about that stuff too and sometimes I think some problems are really like:

https://xkcd.com/530/

I suspect a big one is "regular" engineering vs software engineering. Regular engineering has schedules and (apart from the apple campus) can put up a building in a predictable amount of time. Also testing and maintenance and more.

Bee waggle dance found to be analogous to a 2d projection from a 6D flag manifold, complete with explanation of how the dance changes between a figure 8 shape to a round shape at a certain indicated distance- not much of a problem solved though, perhaps bringing more questions than answers...

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/quantum-honeyb...

I'm not sure your question is correct given your premise.

Is the breadth of knowledge related to cross domain discoveries?

I would say bringing narrow skills like management or IT or marketing to a company is what you want to aim for.

I'm not convinced cross domain issues exist at rates higher than internal domain issues. I think they are orders of magnitude lower.