13 ms·

The 1980 Math Olympiad Program: Where are they now?

165 points by claywm 12y ago

nickysielicki 12y ago
Listening to Jordan ramble at the bottom was really fun, seeing his personality come through. He taught me my discrete class just a year ago, I got so lucky.
lmm 12y ago
> According to one online source, Jeremy was a “Harvard-educated maths genius whose computer models alerted the bank to how small levels of defaults would quickly turn apparently sound assets into junk,” leading Goldman to start selling off at the end of 2006. OK, whatever. Are you kidding me? This is huge; this is what prevented the financial crisis, as bad as it was, from turning into something much worse (it's "bad" for a bubble to pop, but it's worse for it to keep growing and pop later). This guy made the difference between billions of dollars going into houses that people couldn't afford and weren't worth the cost, and that same money going into productive investments. He probably contributed more to humanity than the rest of the list put together, with the possible exception of the other Goldman guy. I know everyone thinks their own field is the most important, and I love academic maths, but goddam the snobbery towards the people who did something more directly useful with their talents is irritating here.
- sz4kerto 12y ago
  It's important, but countless quant/quant dev knew this before the crisis. At most banks, nobody cared. Otherwise I agree.
- nos4A2 12y ago
  Honestly, it just sounded like a harmless joke directed at bankers on someone's blog :)
  - lmm 12y ago
    Read the comments; the guy seems pretty serious.
    - pacofvf 12y ago
      yep, he abhors the finance industry: Andrew says: March 18, 2015 at 9:41 am Nick: You ask why I said “That’s too bad” after learning that Gregg is a vice president at Goldman Sachs. Perhaps the best analogy is, what if you knew someone who was one of the top high school basketball prospects in the country, but instead of ending up in the NBA he made a career as a sports hustler, using trick bets to make money off suckers. This is not a perfect analogy, as this sort of sports betting is illegal, I guess, but the point is that it’s sad to see a great talent that is being used neither in its pure form or for scientific progress or the public good.
- learnstats2 12y ago
  If you're a talented mathematician who thinks that the financial industry is a net positive for society, you're most probably already working in it. It undoubtedly pays the best and generally recruits talent. So, if you're a talented mathematician not working in that industry... it's reasonably likely you've made a conscious decision not to work there - perhaps because you don't agree that it's directly useful to society. There's a reason why the financial industry has to pay the highest salaries. It's surely not out of generosity.
  - kamaal 12y ago
    Its not that finance is bad, people who love to work in some field which doesn't pay well always tend to think lowly of people who work in other fields and get paid well.
  - davmre 12y ago
    Lots of people just don't think of financial modeling as a particularly interesting or beautiful area of math (this is of course a matter of taste). You could believe that finance is socially useful, and yet prefer for selfish reasons to work in algebraic geometry instead.
    - trhway 12y ago
      >Lots of people just don't think of financial modeling as a particularly interesting or beautiful area of math I kind of surprised how those things are frequently mixed together. The math is a science while various industry modelling is an application of the known/established tools/skills. It is like designing a drill vs. actually drilling a hole. (note: i have an MS in Math (3.8 GPA) from one of the top Russian schools)
  - saiya-jin 12y ago
    "There's a reason why the financial industry has to pay the highest salaries. It's surely not out of generosity." They are one of few who can afford to pay higher, and give all kinds of perks. Everybody wants the best of breed to work for them, don't we? On the other side, while searching for a job, the lure of neat cashflow is a strong persuator for many. Plus there is plenty of pretty clever people in banking crowd (maybe some of them don't use their talent to max or in a way they would find fulfilling, but that's another topic).
- wheaties 12y ago
  There were plenty more people who came to that conclusion many number of times. There were companies who changed their whole models just so they could sell the software because the result said "you will lose everything" to half the AAA securities out there. That said, I too dislike his tone about finance. Why? Why is it bad to work in one industry over another?
  - Frondo 12y ago
    Because the money industry doesn't actually create anything of value, it just moves money around and takes its cut. Baker? Sure, making cookies adds value to the world. Software? Yeah, writing programs adds something to the world. Holding onto money, lending some of it out, and taking a cut? Not so much.
    - pacofvf 12y ago
      Uber "just moves money around and takes a cut", same with AirBNB, and so any other marketplace.
      - ForHackernews 12y ago
        Yep, and all of those middle-man business that add almost no value should be squeezed down to razor-thin margins and turned into commodities by competition. That's slowly starting to happen in the financial industry, with robo-advisors and cheap index funds taking trillions of dollars out of the hands of overpaid Wall Street firms, but that process takes time. Hopefully we'll start to see the same thing with Lyft and Sidecar eating into Uber's nonsensical valuations.
    - forgotX2 12y ago
      Do you have a mortgage? Could you afford to buy a house without one?
      - Frondo 12y ago
        When the mortgage officer hands me a check, so that I can buy a house, no new value is added to the world. When I pay him off, slowly, over time, and somewhat enrich him, nothing of value has been added to the world.
- mathattack 12y ago
  Per a quick Google search, it appears that Gregg Patruno was also in Fixed Income at Goldman Sachs. (More specifically in Mortgage Backed Securities)
- saretired 12y ago
  Good point -- except the financial crisis was caused in part by techniques and structures invented by other mathematicians and modellers.
- hnnewguy 12y ago
  >This is huge; this is what prevented the financial crisis Hey, I hate the anti-bank sentiment as much as anybody, but you do realize that every asset they sold by Goldman required a buyer, right? So, it prevented nothing, just moved the risk onto someone other institution's balance sheet.
sz4kerto 12y ago
Good friend of mine was finalist around the early '90s. He know has a totally simple 'senior dev' job at one of the big SV company's service centre. One of the things that keep reminding me that success depends on so many things, hard math skills are one of them. Unfortunately, I'm a guy with a very bad impostor sindrome, and a) whenever I see guys like him in worse/intellectually less challeging jobs than me I think I must be just lucky b) whenever I see guys like him I think I must be useless. :)
- throwaway43 12y ago
  It could be that you're lucky or maybe you're just suffering from impostor syndrome. Have you considered that he might be perfectly happy where he is as he can basically relax at his job as most of the tasks that come up , even the difficult ones must be a cakewalk for him. Success has a very narrow definition these days. Here's an interesting story : http://heuna.tumblr.com/post/2415073898/kim-ung-yong-a-child-prodigy-but-happiness http://heuna.tumblr.com/post/2415073898/kim-ung-yong-a-child...
- Bahamut 12y ago
  Sometimes these people tire of being constantly intellectually stimulated, or they take a different view on life than the purist view of the pursuit of long term development of humanity through research. Myself, while I was not an Olympian in Math or Physics (the US fields some very competitive teams full of people who had better resources than me), I consider myself accomplished for what I had & the environment I grew in. I ultimately abandoned academia, in part because of the uncertainty, difficult work, and because my caring for friends won out - attempting to become wealthy enough to support friends in their endeavors, and giving them the resources I never had mattered more to me. I am perfectly happy being a lead developer, mentoring people to success & building products that help people's lives. I have no regrets. It should also be mentioned that being someone who is supremely accomplished in competitions does not mean that the person is the smartest - there may be others smarter than him/her, and just did not have the fortune of growing up in an environment that could best foster that intelligence. Many of the smartest realize this, and don't hang their hats on any particular competition achievement.
- 12y ago
graycat 12y ago
For the criterion of the title, i.e., "where are they now?", from the article and more, sadly, it sounds like a Math Olympiad is not a very good way to do well on the criterion. Why not very good? Because it looks like the students are given what, for the criterion, is poor direction and use of time and effort. E.g., when I look at my education in math and its use in applications, most of the best of the education had nothing to do with anything like a contest, especially a contest in the early and mid teens. Instead, the best education was well selected, well presented material into the best work in math, e.g., via the best authors -- Birkhoff, Halmos, Rudin, Royden, Neveu, Tukey, Kelley, Suppes, Simmons, etc. Or, my impression of encouraging kids in their early and mid teens to pursue math is to give them some enrichment material such as Pascal's triangle, some number theory, various puzzle problems, a lot of recreational math, etc. Why? Because mostly the people directing the efforts and selecting the materials are not very well educated in math. In simple terms, to have kids do well on the criterion in the title is just to have the kids proceed along the main line -- get through the standard high school material in algebra and geometry, with some applications to high school chemistry and physics, and then move on to a fairly standard college major in math -- calculus, modern algebra, linear algebra, advanced calculus, ordinary differential equations, advanced calculus for applications, partial differential equations, point set topology, measure theory, functional analysis, probability, statistics, stochastic processes, etc. Then that background promises to be good for a good answer 30 years later for the criterion "where are they now"?
- psychometry 12y ago
  What kind of odd browser do you use that results in all of your comments end up with manual line breaks after 30 characters?
  - graycat 12y ago
    Browser? Firefox 35.0.1 with some updates. When I view my posts at HN, my browser flows the lines ignoring my end of line indications except does honor blank lines. I thought that such text flowing was arranged by some internal HN server logic.
carlmcqueen 12y ago
I have to admit, when I started reading this I thought the places they'd be would be a lot different. Not sure why I had such weirdly high expectations.
- lmm 12y ago
  Sounds like they're in pretty prestigious positions to me. Lots of professors publishing papers, and a couple working for the biggest name in finance; only one ordinary-sounding job ("web developer in Boston"). What were you expecting? If anything I was surprised so many of them had done so well. I was on the UK squad for a few years and most of my friends from then seem to have ordinary jobs at companies you've never heard of (like me).
  - carlmcqueen 12y ago
    I think I expected NASA-esq types of jobs. While the hedge fund landing zone is very typical of the math grifted grads, I expected a higher % in PHD/professor world then were listed.
    - ska 12y ago
      "grifted grads" - Freudian slip?
- bko 12y ago
  I felt exactly the same. I think its the illusion of the infinite promise of youth and subsequent disappointment. That and it reminds me of my own mortality.
- mathattack 12y ago
  We shouldn't place our values onto them. If someone has a natural talent that they've developed into a very useful skill (mathematics, programming, selling vacuum cleaners, whatever) and they use that to get a cush 9 to 5 job, all the more power too them. Let them spend less time on politics, and more time on family, friends and hobbies. Who are we to say it was a bad decision to let someone else write the next great math paper? If anything, this highlights that an aptitude for theoretical mathematics can be a launching point to a lot of different things, and that's refreshing. (I'd be less likely to encourage kids in math if Professorships were the only outcome)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jdimov 12y ago
The IMO was not held in 1980.
CurtMonash 12y ago
When I told John Tate I was thinking of switching out of mathematics, his response was in effect "Good heavens! If there's anything else you can imagine doing, don't stay in math!" I later read that Wittgenstein had famously said something similar about philosophy. (Context: I was 19 years old and finishing up my PhD in math at Harvard. In that small department, Tate was not one of the professors I knew well.) In fact, I often feel pangs about not staying in academia. On the other hand, I've been able to carve out a life with a big dose of public intellectual -- for want of a better or less pretentious term -- so that's cool too. E.g., I'm repeatedly told that my blog is "required reading" for grad students in the relevant areas of computer science ...
- yodsanklai 12y ago
  > "Good heavens! If there's anything else you can imagine doing, don't stay in math" I heard similar advice from people in many different lines of work including laws, finance, medicine, academia... usually they add it's not as interesting as it used to be. It's a matter of compromise. I wish I could have the salary of banker, the freedom of a tenured professor and the prestige of a doctor.
  - impendia 12y ago
    > the freedom of a tenured professor Well, one disadvantage of academia is that you don't really get to choose where to live, even if your CV is quite good. Indeed, there are a number of academic couples that make crazy long-distance commuter marriages work because they weren't able to get jobs at the same institution (or in the same city).
    - michaelochurch 12y ago
      It didn't used to be that way. The academic job market melted down in the 1980s and now commuter marriages are the norm. These days, there are too many PhDs and few full-time faculty positions. It's horrible, but academia doesn't have to be that way, and wasn't always.
- graycat 12y ago
yodsanklai 12y ago
I played a similar game some time ago. I looked up people from a nationwide (French) elite math program. Most people where either university professor in Math, CS or theoretical Physics, or they were working in finance. Two opposite environments it seems. I wonder how their lives is in the financial industry. I imagine finance as a demanding and stressful environment, driven by big egos, commercial types. How do these math geniuses fit there? what level of freedom do they have in their job? in term of schedule, things they work on and so on...
- imgabe 12y ago
  > demanding and stressful environment, driven by big egos The same is true of academia, from what I understand, just less money.
  - yodsanklai 12y ago
    Not really, or at least it doesn't have to be. Some ambitious and competitive persons may work very hard to publish more papers than their colleague. But for those that don't feel like playing this game and are immune to the comparison with more prolific researchers, it is possible to work very little in a low profile institution.
    - screwedup 12y ago
      I imagine that's true once you get tenure, but not before.
NTDF9 12y ago
As an aside, I find it curious that so many mathematicians, programmers and others associated with logical professions be interested in music. I was relieved to see Olympiad guys from before my birth showing similar traits.
- nilkn 12y ago
  This is totally a tangent, but I've also noticed that juggling is very popular in math circles.
  - eru 12y ago
    There's a special branch of knot theory, I think braid theory, that describes juggling patterns.
coroxout 12y ago
In case anyone else is interested but didn't make it all the way through the comments on the blog page, a commenter notes that Miller Puckette of Max/PD music software fame was one of their coaches a year or two later.
roblm 12y ago
So, really don't like Goldman, huh?
shamefulbronze 12y ago
I participated in the IMO around 2000. Now I work as a software engineer, but I've never lost my love of mathematics. In fact, I still consider myself a mathematician, but instead of seeking inspiration from the physical world (physics) I seek inspiration from the practice of computer programming. This approach has already yielded homotopy type theory, but I think that this is the tip of the iceberg.
adaml_623 12y ago
> Dan Scales: Am I misremembering this name? I can’t find anything on Google. I don't know who Dan Scales is but if you can't google someone nowadays then they might just work for the government ;-)

165 points by claywm 12y ago

Listening to Jordan ramble at the bottom was really fun, seeing his personality come through. He taught me my discrete class just a year ago, I got so lucky.

lmm 12y ago

> According to one online source, Jeremy was a “Harvard-educated maths genius whose computer models alerted the bank to how small levels of defaults would quickly turn apparently sound assets into junk,” leading Goldman to start selling off at the end of 2006. OK, whatever. Are you kidding me? This is huge; this is what prevented the financial crisis, as bad as it was, from turning into something much worse (it's "bad" for a bubble to pop, but it's worse for it to keep growing and pop later). This guy made the difference between billions of dollars going into houses that people couldn't afford and weren't worth the cost, and that same money going into productive investments. He probably contributed more to humanity than the rest of the list put together, with the possible exception of the other Goldman guy. I know everyone thinks their own field is the most important, and I love academic maths, but goddam the snobbery towards the people who did something more directly useful with their talents is irritating here.

sz4kerto 12y ago
It's important, but countless quant/quant dev knew this before the crisis. At most banks, nobody cared. Otherwise I agree.
nos4A2 12y ago
Honestly, it just sounded like a harmless joke directed at bankers on someone's blog :)
- lmm 12y ago
  Read the comments; the guy seems pretty serious.
  - pacofvf 12y ago
    yep, he abhors the finance industry: Andrew says: March 18, 2015 at 9:41 am Nick: You ask why I said “That’s too bad” after learning that Gregg is a vice president at Goldman Sachs. Perhaps the best analogy is, what if you knew someone who was one of the top high school basketball prospects in the country, but instead of ending up in the NBA he made a career as a sports hustler, using trick bets to make money off suckers. This is not a perfect analogy, as this sort of sports betting is illegal, I guess, but the point is that it’s sad to see a great talent that is being used neither in its pure form or for scientific progress or the public good.
learnstats2 12y ago
If you're a talented mathematician who thinks that the financial industry is a net positive for society, you're most probably already working in it. It undoubtedly pays the best and generally recruits talent. So, if you're a talented mathematician not working in that industry... it's reasonably likely you've made a conscious decision not to work there - perhaps because you don't agree that it's directly useful to society. There's a reason why the financial industry has to pay the highest salaries. It's surely not out of generosity.
- kamaal 12y ago
  Its not that finance is bad, people who love to work in some field which doesn't pay well always tend to think lowly of people who work in other fields and get paid well.
- davmre 12y ago
  Lots of people just don't think of financial modeling as a particularly interesting or beautiful area of math (this is of course a matter of taste). You could believe that finance is socially useful, and yet prefer for selfish reasons to work in algebraic geometry instead.
  - trhway 12y ago
    >Lots of people just don't think of financial modeling as a particularly interesting or beautiful area of math I kind of surprised how those things are frequently mixed together. The math is a science while various industry modelling is an application of the known/established tools/skills. It is like designing a drill vs. actually drilling a hole. (note: i have an MS in Math (3.8 GPA) from one of the top Russian schools)
- saiya-jin 12y ago
  "There's a reason why the financial industry has to pay the highest salaries. It's surely not out of generosity." They are one of few who can afford to pay higher, and give all kinds of perks. Everybody wants the best of breed to work for them, don't we? On the other side, while searching for a job, the lure of neat cashflow is a strong persuator for many. Plus there is plenty of pretty clever people in banking crowd (maybe some of them don't use their talent to max or in a way they would find fulfilling, but that's another topic).
wheaties 12y ago
There were plenty more people who came to that conclusion many number of times. There were companies who changed their whole models just so they could sell the software because the result said "you will lose everything" to half the AAA securities out there. That said, I too dislike his tone about finance. Why? Why is it bad to work in one industry over another?
- Frondo 12y ago
  Because the money industry doesn't actually create anything of value, it just moves money around and takes its cut. Baker? Sure, making cookies adds value to the world. Software? Yeah, writing programs adds something to the world. Holding onto money, lending some of it out, and taking a cut? Not so much.
  - pacofvf 12y ago
    Uber "just moves money around and takes a cut", same with AirBNB, and so any other marketplace.
    - ForHackernews 12y ago
      Yep, and all of those middle-man business that add almost no value should be squeezed down to razor-thin margins and turned into commodities by competition. That's slowly starting to happen in the financial industry, with robo-advisors and cheap index funds taking trillions of dollars out of the hands of overpaid Wall Street firms, but that process takes time. Hopefully we'll start to see the same thing with Lyft and Sidecar eating into Uber's nonsensical valuations.
  - forgotX2 12y ago
    Do you have a mortgage? Could you afford to buy a house without one?
    - Frondo 12y ago
      When the mortgage officer hands me a check, so that I can buy a house, no new value is added to the world. When I pay him off, slowly, over time, and somewhat enrich him, nothing of value has been added to the world.
mathattack 12y ago
Per a quick Google search, it appears that Gregg Patruno was also in Fixed Income at Goldman Sachs. (More specifically in Mortgage Backed Securities)
saretired 12y ago
Good point -- except the financial crisis was caused in part by techniques and structures invented by other mathematicians and modellers.
hnnewguy 12y ago
>This is huge; this is what prevented the financial crisis Hey, I hate the anti-bank sentiment as much as anybody, but you do realize that every asset they sold by Goldman required a buyer, right? So, it prevented nothing, just moved the risk onto someone other institution's balance sheet.

sz4kerto 12y ago

Good friend of mine was finalist around the early '90s. He know has a totally simple 'senior dev' job at one of the big SV company's service centre. One of the things that keep reminding me that success depends on so many things, hard math skills are one of them. Unfortunately, I'm a guy with a very bad impostor sindrome, and a) whenever I see guys like him in worse/intellectually less challeging jobs than me I think I must be just lucky b) whenever I see guys like him I think I must be useless. :)

throwaway43 12y ago
It could be that you're lucky or maybe you're just suffering from impostor syndrome. Have you considered that he might be perfectly happy where he is as he can basically relax at his job as most of the tasks that come up , even the difficult ones must be a cakewalk for him. Success has a very narrow definition these days. Here's an interesting story : http://heuna.tumblr.com/post/2415073898/kim-ung-yong-a-child-prodigy-but-happiness http://heuna.tumblr.com/post/2415073898/kim-ung-yong-a-child...
Bahamut 12y ago
Sometimes these people tire of being constantly intellectually stimulated, or they take a different view on life than the purist view of the pursuit of long term development of humanity through research. Myself, while I was not an Olympian in Math or Physics (the US fields some very competitive teams full of people who had better resources than me), I consider myself accomplished for what I had & the environment I grew in. I ultimately abandoned academia, in part because of the uncertainty, difficult work, and because my caring for friends won out - attempting to become wealthy enough to support friends in their endeavors, and giving them the resources I never had mattered more to me. I am perfectly happy being a lead developer, mentoring people to success & building products that help people's lives. I have no regrets. It should also be mentioned that being someone who is supremely accomplished in competitions does not mean that the person is the smartest - there may be others smarter than him/her, and just did not have the fortune of growing up in an environment that could best foster that intelligence. Many of the smartest realize this, and don't hang their hats on any particular competition achievement.
12y ago

graycat 12y ago

For the criterion of the title, i.e., "where are they now?", from the article and more, sadly, it sounds like a Math Olympiad is not a very good way to do well on the criterion. Why not very good? Because it looks like the students are given what, for the criterion, is poor direction and use of time and effort. E.g., when I look at my education in math and its use in applications, most of the best of the education had nothing to do with anything like a contest, especially a contest in the early and mid teens. Instead, the best education was well selected, well presented material into the best work in math, e.g., via the best authors -- Birkhoff, Halmos, Rudin, Royden, Neveu, Tukey, Kelley, Suppes, Simmons, etc. Or, my impression of encouraging kids in their early and mid teens to pursue math is to give them some enrichment material such as Pascal's triangle, some number theory, various puzzle problems, a lot of recreational math, etc. Why? Because mostly the people directing the efforts and selecting the materials are not very well educated in math. In simple terms, to have kids do well on the criterion in the title is just to have the kids proceed along the main line -- get through the standard high school material in algebra and geometry, with some applications to high school chemistry and physics, and then move on to a fairly standard college major in math -- calculus, modern algebra, linear algebra, advanced calculus, ordinary differential equations, advanced calculus for applications, partial differential equations, point set topology, measure theory, functional analysis, probability, statistics, stochastic processes, etc. Then that background promises to be good for a good answer 30 years later for the criterion "where are they now"?

psychometry 12y ago
What kind of odd browser do you use that results in all of your comments end up with manual line breaks after 30 characters?
- graycat 12y ago
  Browser? Firefox 35.0.1 with some updates. When I view my posts at HN, my browser flows the lines ignoring my end of line indications except does honor blank lines. I thought that such text flowing was arranged by some internal HN server logic.

carlmcqueen 12y ago

I have to admit, when I started reading this I thought the places they'd be would be a lot different. Not sure why I had such weirdly high expectations.

lmm 12y ago
Sounds like they're in pretty prestigious positions to me. Lots of professors publishing papers, and a couple working for the biggest name in finance; only one ordinary-sounding job ("web developer in Boston"). What were you expecting? If anything I was surprised so many of them had done so well. I was on the UK squad for a few years and most of my friends from then seem to have ordinary jobs at companies you've never heard of (like me).
- carlmcqueen 12y ago
  I think I expected NASA-esq types of jobs. While the hedge fund landing zone is very typical of the math grifted grads, I expected a higher % in PHD/professor world then were listed.
  - ska 12y ago
    "grifted grads" - Freudian slip?
bko 12y ago
I felt exactly the same. I think its the illusion of the infinite promise of youth and subsequent disappointment. That and it reminds me of my own mortality.
mathattack 12y ago
We shouldn't place our values onto them. If someone has a natural talent that they've developed into a very useful skill (mathematics, programming, selling vacuum cleaners, whatever) and they use that to get a cush 9 to 5 job, all the more power too them. Let them spend less time on politics, and more time on family, friends and hobbies. Who are we to say it was a bad decision to let someone else write the next great math paper? If anything, this highlights that an aptitude for theoretical mathematics can be a launching point to a lot of different things, and that's refreshing. (I'd be less likely to encourage kids in math if Professorships were the only outcome)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jdimov 12y ago

The IMO was not held in 1980.

CurtMonash 12y ago

When I told John Tate I was thinking of switching out of mathematics, his response was in effect "Good heavens! If there's anything else you can imagine doing, don't stay in math!" I later read that Wittgenstein had famously said something similar about philosophy. (Context: I was 19 years old and finishing up my PhD in math at Harvard. In that small department, Tate was not one of the professors I knew well.) In fact, I often feel pangs about not staying in academia. On the other hand, I've been able to carve out a life with a big dose of public intellectual -- for want of a better or less pretentious term -- so that's cool too. E.g., I'm repeatedly told that my blog is "required reading" for grad students in the relevant areas of computer science ...

yodsanklai 12y ago
> "Good heavens! If there's anything else you can imagine doing, don't stay in math" I heard similar advice from people in many different lines of work including laws, finance, medicine, academia... usually they add it's not as interesting as it used to be. It's a matter of compromise. I wish I could have the salary of banker, the freedom of a tenured professor and the prestige of a doctor.
- impendia 12y ago
  > the freedom of a tenured professor Well, one disadvantage of academia is that you don't really get to choose where to live, even if your CV is quite good. Indeed, there are a number of academic couples that make crazy long-distance commuter marriages work because they weren't able to get jobs at the same institution (or in the same city).
  - michaelochurch 12y ago
    It didn't used to be that way. The academic job market melted down in the 1980s and now commuter marriages are the norm. These days, there are too many PhDs and few full-time faculty positions. It's horrible, but academia doesn't have to be that way, and wasn't always.
graycat 12y ago

yodsanklai 12y ago

I played a similar game some time ago. I looked up people from a nationwide (French) elite math program. Most people where either university professor in Math, CS or theoretical Physics, or they were working in finance. Two opposite environments it seems. I wonder how their lives is in the financial industry. I imagine finance as a demanding and stressful environment, driven by big egos, commercial types. How do these math geniuses fit there? what level of freedom do they have in their job? in term of schedule, things they work on and so on...

imgabe 12y ago
> demanding and stressful environment, driven by big egos The same is true of academia, from what I understand, just less money.
- yodsanklai 12y ago
  Not really, or at least it doesn't have to be. Some ambitious and competitive persons may work very hard to publish more papers than their colleague. But for those that don't feel like playing this game and are immune to the comparison with more prolific researchers, it is possible to work very little in a low profile institution.
  - screwedup 12y ago
    I imagine that's true once you get tenure, but not before.

NTDF9 12y ago

As an aside, I find it curious that so many mathematicians, programmers and others associated with logical professions be interested in music. I was relieved to see Olympiad guys from before my birth showing similar traits.

nilkn 12y ago
This is totally a tangent, but I've also noticed that juggling is very popular in math circles.
- eru 12y ago
  There's a special branch of knot theory, I think braid theory, that describes juggling patterns.

coroxout 12y ago

In case anyone else is interested but didn't make it all the way through the comments on the blog page, a commenter notes that Miller Puckette of Max/PD music software fame was one of their coaches a year or two later.

roblm 12y ago

So, really don't like Goldman, huh?

shamefulbronze 12y ago

I participated in the IMO around 2000. Now I work as a software engineer, but I've never lost my love of mathematics. In fact, I still consider myself a mathematician, but instead of seeking inspiration from the physical world (physics) I seek inspiration from the practice of computer programming. This approach has already yielded homotopy type theory, but I think that this is the tip of the iceberg.

adaml_623 12y ago

> Dan Scales: Am I misremembering this name? I can’t find anything on Google. I don't know who Dan Scales is but if you can't google someone nowadays then they might just work for the government ;-)