When I was in high school I fell in love with physics. I was dreaming of becoming a theoretical physicist. I remember right after graduating from high school I

When I was in high school I fell in love with physics. I was dreaming of becoming a theoretical physicist. I remember right after graduating from high school I went to a library and borrowed a book about black holes by Chandrasekhar. I saw it was far too difficult, but that was the type of science that excited me. I was also in love with nuclear engineering (the civilian part, I didn't care about nuclear bombs). Now I'm a quant on Wall Street. I am lucky to use some quite advanced and cool math in my day to day job. About a week ago I figured out that for a particular numerical quadrature that I had, the tanh-sinh method beats down handily the Gauss-Legendre quadrature, and I was really excited. Still, the math I use is probably 1% the math one would use to study black holes or to simulate the inner workings of a nuclear reactor. But that's ok. I keep learning new math almost every day, and I keep reading books about nuclear engineering. I don't think I will ever work in the nuclear field, but it's a hobby I enjoy to follow up the latest developments in the field and to try to understand what the difficulties are and what's likely to succeed and what to fail.