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My experience with pure math is that this is not necessary to get job as one, even at good institutions, but you will be terrorized by the arrogance of the ones
by viccis 1y ago
My experience with pure math is that this is not necessary to get job as one, even at good institutions, but you will be terrorized by the arrogance of the ones you mention. Learning to deal with the "brilliant jerk" is a problem in many fields, but the ones I've met in pure math are some of the weirdest (and most vicious)
- qsort 1y agoAt least from my point of view (in the industry, not academia) this is actually the opposite. Math graduates tend to be smart and humble and I respect them a lot. Sometimes it almost feels like math and physics are the last "real" degrees left.
- monkeyelite 1y agoYes, and those are the ones who didn’t make it to researcher.
- Ivan92 1y agoWho's to say that you can't go into industry and not be a researcher? You don't have to stay in academia to do research. Many companies and industries tend to publish papers and some even work with universities for research.
- zamadatix 1y agoI don't think that's what GP was saying, but I could be wrong.
- monkeyelite 1y agoNo I’m saying the top tier mathematicians tend to work in academia because that’s where the most math is done (general trend with exceptions).
- Ivan92 1y agoI think that is a fair statement to make. Thanks for clarifying :)
- BeetleB 1y agoSimilar - I found math majors to be fairly humble. Yes, there's always the exception, but I found them to be fairly fun folks. Physics majors, in my experience, had a significantly higher arrogance level.
- viccis 1y agoI'm talking about professors at R1 schools and Ivies to be clear.
- monkeyelite 1y agoA corollary of this is that many professional mathematicians are not actually competitive in research. It’s just different leagues of intelligence: social studies undergrad vs math undergrad vs math grad vs competitive researcher.
- hiAndrewQuinn 1y agoThis is what I've observed as well. By my own metrics and grades, I was a somewhat bright math minor (near-perfect score in abstract algebra, etc), would have been middle of the pack as a PhD student, may have been below par if I managed to complete the PhD, and almost certainly would have been deadweight as a pure mathematician myself. That's just how the scaling and competitive dynamics have worked out; it's not really something to feel personally bad about, any more than you might feel personally bad about not having the potential to be a competitive figure skater. EDIT: Uh, actually, it looks like I may have underestimated myself at basically every point here and would have become a basically okay mathematician based on updated priors.
- photonthug 1y agoThe silly thing about this is that context is everything. I bet it's extremely easy to be a top-tier figure-skater in, say, a small tropical island nation? In a similar way, I very much doubt that you'd really need to be in the top 0.2% of the population to complete a phd. Do you need to be in the top 0.2% of people to compete as a contributor with absolutely everyone else in the whole world at the same time? Well yeah, but at that point the statement is so obviously true that it doesn't mean much.
- hiAndrewQuinn 1y agoYou're right in a sense, but I took the context we're working in as somewhat of a given based on the title of the post. Our goal is to work, full time, as a professional pure mathematician; that naturally puts us in the labor market for pure mathematicians. We can't know that market exactly, of course, but it's far from arbitrary. We are in competition with other market participants, and we can study their properties and use that knowledge to guide our actions productively - including making the decision to exit the market if that's what makes sense to us.