
Bill Thurston answers: What's a mathematician to do? - ColinWright
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematician-to-do/44213#44213
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etiam
Invigorating.

And predictably the question has been closed, as "no longer relevant [...]
This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to
a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily
narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of
the internet."

Makes me wonder how Stack Exchange is still getting both good questions and
good answers.

~~~
lumberjack
>Makes me wonder how Stack Exchange is still getting both good questions and
good answers.

For math, it's retired or semi-retired professors who spend their days
answering relatively basic questions from undergrads and such.

It's amazing actually. I got more professor time on stackexchange than I did
in real life.

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hdevarajan
Thurston is low dimensional topologist and Fields medalist. From the Wikipedia
page:

'In fact, Thurston resolved so many outstanding problems in foliation theory
in such a short period of time that it led to a kind of exodus from the field,
where advisors counselled students against going into foliation theory[1]
because Thurston was "cleaning out the subject"'

~~~
Simon_says
_was_ , sadly.

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zitterbewegung
Doing mathematics and furthering human understanding is great. The problem is
that no one wants to tell you how the sausage is made . It’s mainly on the
backs of graduate students that have no chance of being professors. The ones
that know how to code go into competition with people that have Bachelors in
CS and four years of work experience . The good ones can land a Data science
job . The ones that can’t become adjuncts forever in some community college.
There are fewer and fewer that can win this rich mans game .

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KGIII
If you scroll down, you'll find an answer where it appears that math broke
their brain and they left to go start a restaurant and then did other things
like computer graphics. The math department is home to some tragically
spectacular mental breakdowns.

But, I don't think his answer is limited just to mathematicians. The gist of
it is 'Go do good things and be smart.' I think those same things could apply
to even someone without a high school diploma, though probably with less
chance of efficacy.

It's a great response and unfortunate that they closed it.

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j7ake
Thurston has a great answer. People need to avoid thinking in academic
departments and focus on asking which problems are important to them. Focus on
problem first, then figure out what basic principles you need to tackle the
problem, regardless of the field these basic principles come from.

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unixhero
"Closed as question is not ...[x]"

 _sigh_

~~~
paulpauper
I suspect a question is closed when it has already been sufficiently answered
. Keeping it open means it would keep being 'bumped' and become redundant. If
you look at Quora, often a popular question will have 4 good answers and
dozens of low-quality ones. better to just close the question then.

~~~
combatentropy
Then I wonder if Stack Overflow should add a reason for closing, "sufficiently
answered," so that the editor can choose that instead of the inaccurate and
incendiary "no longer relevant."

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jason_slack
This is helpful for me. As someone who is old (well 40), lol, and studying to
get a math degree. I often wonder what I will do with it. I already have a CS
degree. I could teach, I could work to solve the unsolved math problems, I
could work on compression or cryptography. I guess I still don't know what I
do.

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paulpauper
Imho, it boils down to solving problems, explaining existing phenomena, and to
gain a deeper understanding of things. For example, if you suspend a rope
between two anchors, empirically, it looks like a parabola, but it's actually
a hyperbolic cosine. fascinating.

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metafunctor
Having personally known two mathematicians who committed suicide because they
felt they didn't amount to anything by their 30s, I wish every new
mathematician would read this post.

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lainon
Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8265509](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8265509)

