>I also realized the difference between a physicist and a mathematician: a physicist is openly willing to compromise their principles and stretch the truth for

>I also realized the difference between a physicist and a mathematician: a physicist is openly willing to compromise their principles and stretch the truth for the sake of press, while a mathematician sticks to the truth and as a result nobody cares. 1.) This is an over generalization that's insulting to physicists. That physicist you saw was clearly not a good speaker. I've seen mathematicians give poor talks and I've seen plenty of physicists give good talks. 2.) I think you have things backwards. Physicists get a lot of press for their work (CERN has it's own PR department and I'm sure plenty of other national labs do as well). Mathematicians, in comparison, do not get that much press for what they do. As a results, physicists are constantly forced to "compromise their principles and stretch the truth" in order to fit an explanation/justification of their work into a five paragraph news article. Mathematicians do not get the same level of press and public interest and are therefor not under as much (or any) pressure to simplify their results for the media to abuse. I'll admit that this is a biased opinion but I'm not trying to compare the importance of each subject here. But in my experience I've noticed that the general population is much more interested in modern physics than mathematics.