As swGooF said, you won't be able to find too many places to do math without apply it to something useful. Academia, in the other hand, is quite complicated, ma

As swGooF said, you won't be able to find too many places to do math without apply it to something useful. Academia, in the other hand, is quite complicated, mainly because the famous "Publish or Perish" [1]. If you don't want to live your life publishing papers without too much sense, I'd say to focus on find a good place/subject of applied math and work on it. It should be as much as fun as do pure math, applied math has a lot of research and math as pure math, although probably less algebra :) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish