A Mathematician's Confession: Why I Lied About Loving Math
No country for mediocre mathematicians
A newly minted PhD in arithmetic geometry reflects on the gap between the public story of a mathematician's life and the reality of incremental progress, jealousy, and the looming impact of AI. The author admits to lying about their passion, compares themselves to prodigies like Alysa Liu and Hannah Cairo, and describes coauthoring a preprint with Claude Opus. They argue that 'mediocre' mathematicians still matter, even as AI accelerates research and reshapes the field.
The mediocre mathematician has always had purpose.
- arjie
Really enjoyable read. I escaped a career in Mathematics by being sufficiently bad at it that I only have a Masters. Fortunately, I escaped to a field immune to AI: CS and then a software engineering career. Well, not really, but I did get a good 15 years out of it so thank god for that.
About half of my friends are founders of various startups and the rest are executives of and almost all of them have the view that it’s better for everything to be a failure than to be in the “it could make it” category for half a decade or more.
In that way, I am glad I found that it wasn’t for me. I had the curiosity, but not the doggedness to face difficulty (not enough curiosity perhaps?) or the ability to not encounter such difficulty. And fortunately that meant I was never in the “I could make it” category. God bless clear and present boundaries and may the devil take the grey zone.
- txhwind
Funded positions are much less than PhD number. However, people can fund themselves with a job. In a country, if it's easy to to get a part-time job with enough payment, mathematicians can continue work.
- randusername
> We're all frustration addicts. We just want to bang our heads against problems we don't yet know how to solve.
I've been tapering off AI lately. I think I've realized that conquering the struggle is the fun part, and accomplishments just don't hit the same if AI is smoothing over every friction and cordoning off all the pitfalls and rabbit-holes.
- ventana
It's interesting that this piece stands well enough if you replace mathematics with probably any other intellectual profession, including software development or pretty much anything else.
And, I lie to anyone who asks me why I’m a mathematician.
It is much easier to claim “I love learning the laws of life,”
while literally handwaving, than it is for me to flashback to
the twenty or so pivotal moments that lead to me walking out
of Gainesville with a PhD in Arithmetic Geometry.
Since “normal” people mostly don't understand what the software development job is about, handwaving in response to regular questions: “what do you do at work?”, “what do you like about your job?” – is pretty normal. I think that most of us have some prepared answers ready to use.
Mathematics is the thing you try to understand, don’t,
get frustrated about, and then do.
Just like the software development. I truly believe that the only people who can survive a software job are those who can tolerate the constant feeling of frustration caused by things not working or breaking for random reasons, and persevere in this environment to do the things you need to do.
- derangedHorse
> My physicist friend once asked me what the point of doing research was if someone like Terence Tao could have figured out everything in my dissertation in a tenth of the time. I answered by pointing out that Terence Tao didn’t. Terence Tao did not find a small open problem posited by my advisor and publish a bite sized result making incremental progress. He has only so much time and so many other fish to fry.
This reminds me of a post I saw recently, although I can't remember the platform. It said something along the lines of assessing the limits of AI by finding the dumbest questions it can't solve. I think that pairs well as an additional way to view meaning through one's work.
The linked post points out constrained attention as a way to bring meaning to novel work that no one else took on. With AI, this can still be applied to compute.
I'm just wondering if there are a class of problems that humans, at least in the short-term, where humans need to be in the loop to solve more efficiently.
- jazzpush2
This is the best thing I've read in years.
- arunix
Related: Does one have to be a genius to do maths?
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t...
- dmix
This author has a natural talent for writing. That was interesting throughout.