I left math for a totally different reason and I'm almost embarrassed to talk about it. A little background...
I worked full time through college and graduated with less than $100 in the bank. I had opportunities to go on to graduate school for either math or business.
Every professor in our math department drove an older subcompact except the department head who drove a Chevy Impala. Imagine, work your whole life, get to the top of your field, and drive an Impala!
I had struggled too long to set myself up for more struggle. So I went on to get my MBA, learned how to program, and have never had a lack of good quality, high paying work. I'm a little embarrassed that I was so shallow back then, but maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me something. I love math, but I'm sure glad I made the choice I did.
At a recent math reunion, I felt right at home once again. I met a buddy who graduated with me and continued on to become a tenured math professor at a major university. I asked him how he felt about his choice. He told me, "I'll never be rich, but I teach calculus for 8 hours per week 9 months per year, I don't have to publish, and my wife and I have visited over 100 countries. Not a bad life at all."
> Every professor in our math department drove an older subcompact except the department head who drove a Chevy Impala. Imagine, work your whole life, get to the top of your field, and drive an Impala!
Might this be cultural? Most of my professors in grad school also drove rather inexpensive cars. It certainly wasn't because they couldn't afford better. They would have been thought somehow 'unserious' to buy an expensive car.
In Ontario we have some crazy law that forces all public sector salaries over $100,000 to be disclosed. For example, here is Waterloo's: http://uwaterloo.ca/documents/sal2008.php (incidentally with a pretty respected mathematics department).
A little shocking at first, but most of the people are deserving.
Go to "Pay Rates By Job Title". It used to be only those above $100k, but was recently expanded to include everyone. I personally think it goes too far in including names. I could understand breaking it down by position, but giving names seems like a violation of privacy.
I don't think this has anything to do with unions. Georgia has a similar website (and Georgia is mostly anti-union). I think it has more to do with being a check-and-balance when dealing with people who are being paid with public money. You often hear about those scandals where public employees gave themselves and their friends huge salaries and bonuses; I think these websites are there to expose those types of fraud. It's no different than top executives at public (public as in stock listed, rather than gov't owned) having to disclose their compensation packages. People in a position of power have a tendency to abuse that power. There needs to be transparency in these cases.
> It's no different than top executives at public (public as in stock listed, rather than gov't owned) having to disclose their compensation packages.
Except it is different in that _all_ employees are listed by name with their salary. A lowly Programmer Analyst II has no ability to determine anyone's salary, much less his own, yet is listed by full name.
Granted, I have worked in government and seen first hand that when leadership changes, suddenly there are a ton of new hires (all the friends of the new leader), so this kind of tool could be useful to make sure these new hires aren't paid over-generously. It seems like that duty could be handled by an internal auditing agency, which would have access to individual names, whereas the public would just see the range/mean/stddev for each position title.
Yes, if this was universally true, it would help employees negotiate. Employers sometimes claim that the goal is to reduce jealousy, but the public employees in states with this sort of law do just fine.
It is all Canadian dollars, but they exchange rate is close to par and a six figure salary here is still still relatively large. It is interesting for students because we can see how much a particular professor is 'worth' to the university. I'm not sure if it has any effect on recruiting as the disclosure isn't all that well known.
What kind of math department were you at? It may be due to the slight applied-leaning nature of my department, but the top professors earn six-figure salaries, and the assistant department head that I do research with drives a very nice, new BMW SUV.
Still, your friend's point about his lifestyle is important. Teachers at any level are seldom paid well, but the work environment and schedule often make up for it, so long as you still enjoy teaching. Just consider how in the business world, the concept of a sabbatical is often quite foreign.
This seems like something of a false dichotomy to me. The professors at my school (UCSD) in math, econ, and engineering were all industry consultants and/or entrepreneurs and drove around in very nice cars like Porsches, Benzes, Lexus etc. (I never saw their houses but a good many of them live in La Jolla).
In fact, many of them were so busy with their 'extracurricular' activities that they sometimes attempted (unsuccessfully) to schedule exams and lectures at hours like 7am or 9pm.
The Chancellor drove a turbo porsche! I can only imagine what the faculty at a school like Stanford is like...
It always seemed to me that being a professor opened doors into industry, instead of 'locking' you down.
There's a noticeable gradient in car preferences as you go from northern to southern California. At multiple points in my career at UC Berkeley, I saw older model, unshowy American cars parked in the "NL" parking spots. (Guess what NL stands for, hint not a country in Europe.) After I graduated and started working in the Bay Area I met many people would could not have been making <$200k driving normal everyday cars. The most extreme example would be someone whom I knew for a fact was worth eight figures driving a Cadillac. It was shiny and new but, really? A Caddy?
As I went to high school in LA, where it seems like 2/3 of the population over 20 is driving a late model BMW, this was something of a eye-opener: a lot of rich people just aren't that into cars. That, and the whole conspicuous consumption thing is a lot more en vogue in some places than in others. So to answer your question, the faculty at Stanford probably drive a lot of Hondas. (Someone chime in if I'm wrong, haven't been to the Farm in a while.)
I have no idea what you're talking about, Silicon Valley and SF are filled to the brim with expensive and exotic cars. Cruise around Atherton and Los Altos hills or go to downtown PA or the nice parts of cupertino - Ferraris, Astons, Porsches, BMW, Lexus, etc, etc. Even as far as Santa Cruz I have seen plenty of people in their nice sports cars driving fast on 17 all the time.
This notion that "rich people aren't into cars" in northern california is absolutely laughable. Sure there are MORE nice cars in LA, but that's only because LA is a much larger metro area.
I've lived in both the bay and LA and I can tell that this game of "spot the differences" that so many people play are observations based on selection and confirmation bias. You're just looking for evidence that supports ideas you already have.
In my opinion SF and LA are pretty much the exact same culturally. People from SF just hate to admit it.
My impression is that professors get to work with industry on their terms: they only collaborate for specific projects that are of interest to them, and they do it in a non-corporate environment, with students to do most of the dirty work.
My oldest son is a math-liker who has been exposed to the pure mathematics research community through summer programs, and he (college-applying age) and I are currently pondering whether becoming a math professor is a better fit for him, or whether he will truly find paradise as a hacker starting a SaaS business.
"These days mathematicians are divided into little cliques of perhaps a dozen people who work on the same stuff. All of the papers you write get peer reviewed by your clique. You then make a point of reading what your clique produces and writing papers that cite theirs. Nobody outside the clique is likely to pay much attention to, or be able to easily understand, work done within the clique. Over time people do move between cliques, but this social structure is ubiquitous. Anyone who can't accept it doesn't remain in mathematics."
I think this is an exaggeration. Sure, much of mathematics and maybe most of mathematics today works like this, but it's the exceptions, in accordance with Sturgeon's Law, that are most interesting. The really good specialists tend to transcend little cliques, and sometimes entire fields. There are plenty of people who are respected outside the circle of their immediate coauthors, everybody (for some definition of "everybody" that is anyhow wider than a little clique) wants to read their papers, etc.
You could say that these are rare exceptions and >90% of working mathematicians are producing highly specialized papers that are interesting to maybe a dozen other people, that don't know much outside their narrow focus and don't really care, and so on. And you'd be right. But in programming, isn't it the case that >90% of programmers are chugging along in their Java or C# shops, writing some enterprisey horror or an internal corporate monstrosity, never caring enough to read Joel, nevermind Hacker News, or to improve their knowledge of the language they're using everyday, nevermind learn Haskell. The talented hackers are rare outliers. So what's different?
I do agree with some other thoughts in the article. Someone who wants to dabble in many things has their work cut out in the academic math culture. I left grad school because I couldn't hack a bloody-minded focus on working on my thesis and doing nothing else. I had other reasons to suspect I won't be staying around in academia. For one thing, I despise internal politics and petty squabbling, and what I saw when I looked at the power structure and battles more closely, being a graduate student, shocked and disgusted me. Even more importantly, I had grave doubts about ever being able to do really meaningful work rather than end up writing up small results in a little clique. I doubted I had it in me to become an exception I talked about above. I still regret not testing this more thoroughly by mustering the will-power to shut down everything else, finish the damn thesis and get the damn degree, even if I probably wouldn't end up in academia anyway.
I had a professor once who said something similar. He phrased it differently though: in math people didn't want you to understand. Something about how it made them feel smarter.
Amusingly, he's a top-notch theoretical computer scientist which is really a kind of math (especially what he does). From this, I gathered that its really the culture of the department, not the field that does this.
One possible counter argument which I'm not in a position to evaluate: Theoretical CS is generally more grounded in "real" problems so maybe its easier for people in other areas to understand...?
The problem with mathematics is that it's very hard, it's not for everyone, the common folk cannot understand it, and 99% of those who can will not be on the level of a Felix Klein or Henri Poincaré. This is well exemplified in the book "Indra's Pearls: The Vision of Felix Klein", even today it's hard to trained mathematicians to visualize what Klein described. How many mathematicians does the author of the post supposed there was at Göttingen for just one Klein to come out of blue? To be answered just read the paper "Klein, Hilbert, and the Gottingen Mathematical Tradition". I study applied math and computational science at university, still an undergraduate, because I have fun studying it, not to be a professional mathematician, I'm not smart enough to be good in the area in which I study (Numerical Analysis and Applications, Inverse Problems, Stochastic Processes and Scientific Computing), I'll probably try be a experimental physicist if I chose to remain in academia or will try to be a sysadmin (I already work as one in a part-time job).
I am glad to know that this is true of people within the field. I've always found mathematics a romantic subject, but the landscape is so broad I always feel lost.
Well, maybe not 'glad' --- it's too bad that people are punished when they try to be on more than one bleeding edge. But at least I feel like less of a dunce.
While the landscape may be broad, it should be exciting that you can spend your entire life studying one facet of a subject as deeply as you like and there will still be an infinity of other truths you could have discovered. Talk to colleagues studying other fields, even if you never have an amazing cross-discipline breakthrough, it is nice to hear about other elements of mathematics.
disclaimer: While I finished my degree in mathematics, I immediately entered the field of programming, which was what I had intended to study.
The only way to succeed in grad school is to be single-mindedly focused on mathematics. Not on being a "generalist", not about "cliques", tenure, etc. This "meta-math" reasoning is a bad substitute for doing actual work. Clearly, the guy is better off doing something else.
Just because grad schools don't currently engender generalists doesn't mean that they are a bad thing or less important. It's just harder to measure how accomplished and brilliant a generalist is than it is to measure the contribution of a researcher that has made significant progress in a specific area. Generalism is only really well rewarded when it produces an unexpected solution to or progress toward a solution of an open problem.
I succeeded in grad school, by doing actual mathematical work (my PhD thesis was in Banach Algebras). But I agree with the article, and it's a decent description of some of the reasons I left mathematics.
I'm not sure if I'm atypical, but I do remember having Hugh Woodin give a talk about set theory that I, as a non-specialist (heck, as a computer scientist moonlighting in math grad courses to keep my brain on!) could follow reasonably easily. I still don't know what projective geometry is, but it wasn't necessary to follow his argument.
There are some mathematicians who make big efforts to make their talks accessible to a wider audience. Inexplicably, at least in the mathematics department where I did my PhD, those kinds of talks were actually looked down on by many people.
Same reason most postmodernism and literary theory uses obscurantist language. People value more what they had to work harder for, whether it's understanding or a mug. Making something comprehensible to a broad audience doesn't do anything for the people whose opinion really matters to you, your colleauges, and it makes their work less prestigious by association, because its theoretically comprehensible.
[Rant about Edward Said, and how he said some worthwhile stuff, then made it virtually incomprehensible thought better of]
One could make the argument that cliques encourage more social interaction -- and subsequently more collaboration. This could be more beneficial overall for the field.
I think the bottom line comes down to needs for cross-clique knowledge sharing. The possibility for a change in culture is low if there is no incentive for it.
I loved maths but life as a mathematician was very depressing. Another point I would like to add is that there are very few mathematicians compared to biologists. Actually, I am not very sure if it's true in the US and Europe but it certainly is in India. The biggest of math conferences here have a 100 or so people and so do the smallest of the biology ones.
I worked full time through college and graduated with less than $100 in the bank. I had opportunities to go on to graduate school for either math or business.
Every professor in our math department drove an older subcompact except the department head who drove a Chevy Impala. Imagine, work your whole life, get to the top of your field, and drive an Impala!
I had struggled too long to set myself up for more struggle. So I went on to get my MBA, learned how to program, and have never had a lack of good quality, high paying work. I'm a little embarrassed that I was so shallow back then, but maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me something. I love math, but I'm sure glad I made the choice I did.
At a recent math reunion, I felt right at home once again. I met a buddy who graduated with me and continued on to become a tenured math professor at a major university. I asked him how he felt about his choice. He told me, "I'll never be rich, but I teach calculus for 8 hours per week 9 months per year, I don't have to publish, and my wife and I have visited over 100 countries. Not a bad life at all."