Quit Math?

[Anonymous No.7468947]

Why do great mathematicians inevitably give up mathematics to pursue more worldly things?

I'm thinking of Grothendieck, Galois, Cantor, Perelman, Kaczynski, etc

Is math inherently unsatisfying or is it just academic institutions?

[Anonymous No.7468948]

because being great at one thing does not dictate that you cannot be great at other things

[Anonymous No.7468950]

math is gay

[Anonymous No.7468958]

>>7468947
I don't know how you could work on something so abstract and disconnected from the real world and not get bored after awhile.

[Anonymous No.7468964]

>>7468948
yes it does. time, energy, and will are all limited. everything has a cost

[Anonymous No.7468966]

>>7468947
Math is a tool; mathematicians can be thought of very intelligent blacksmiths. Their job is important because without mathematics, we couldn't do a lot of computations in other applications. However, some of them might not find this satisfying. Why build hammers all your life if you can pick up a hammer you crafted and build a house?

This is just my opinion.

[Anonymous No.7468984]

>>7468964
>time, energy, and will are all limited
Oh you poor sad puppy

[Anonymous No.7468986]

>>7468947
A man identifies himself with a Sache, a thing or task, which is his own, and which he pursues without regard to external success or approval. Everyone else is similarly supposed to be devoting himself to his own Sache. Such disinterest fulfillment of tasks rests, however, on self-deception. Its disinterestedness is always held up for the admiration of others, and is really a form of personal exhibitionism. When this is exposed, disinterestedness shifts to the next logical step in maturity.

[Anonymous No.7468990]

>>7468964
Just because you are not bright enough to optimize all of those does not mean any of those are a limiting factor

hence the term, genius

[Anonymous No.7469005]

>>7468947
Kaczynski went nuts because of an psychological experience (if you mean the Unabomber)

[Anonymous No.7469009]

autists realize that their intellectual pursuit hasn't given them any "power" or "insight", but simply dehumanized them and made their life empty

Without love your life will just pass you by

[Anonymous No.7469034]

>>7469009
>Without love your life will just pass you by

[Anonymous No.7469039]

>>7468947
They tried to find patterns pi and failed
miserably

[Anonymous No.7469048]

the numbers have no real meaning by them self . mathematics compliments other fields though. economic fields and scientific fields are obvious choices

[Anonymous No.7469061]

>>7468947
Reason is inherently unsatisfying. There's no biological return.

[Anonymous No.7469082]

>>7469061
>There's no biological return.

what about survival?

[Anonymous No.7469083]

>>7469082
So, that's the biological return. Wars explained.

[Anonymous No.7469088]

>>7469082
Actually, you fucked up my point.

[Anonymous No.7469092]

>>7468947
Galois died in a gun duel. The rest got too old lost their creativity

[Anonymous No.7469094]

Hardy, wrote in his 1940 memoir, A Mathematician's Apology, "No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game."

[Anonymous No.7469102]

>>7469092
>Galois died in a gun duel.

Because he became furiously interested in the politics of his time and gave up math. but more importantly a girl.

The gun fight was over a girl

[Anonymous No.7469113]

>>7468984
Hah, yeah, stupid mortals

>AMIRITE?
>#immortal masterrace

[Anonymous No.7469119]

>>7469102
True, but being a mathematician shouldn't prevent anyone from having other hobbies/interests. That Galois died for political reasons shouldn't be an indicator that he gave up on maths.

[Anonymous No.7469223]

>>7468947
Most of these guys actually went nuts and Galois died too young.
>>7469094
This.

[Anonymous No.7469227]

>>7469094
its builshit, if your only focus is mathematics, you can do it all your life, young mans game refers to the problems of life that come when ure getting older, not the decline of the potential

[Anonymous No.7469232]

math is just finding patterns and creating systems that capture these patterns best, youll never find the magic formula for universe and everything, and that realization made many great minds quit this pointless subject

[Anonymous No.7469249]

>>7469113
Y-you know Rick you c-can be a little harsh sometimes.

[Anonymous No.7469270]

>>7469094
Tfw it's too late for me

[Anonymous No.7469278]

>>7469094
lel insert Erdos exception. But I do think this is bullshit. It's very easy for people to burn out, though.

>>7468947
Kaczynski wasn't a genius. He was pressued by his parents, and there are quotes from him expressing his despise of mathematicians and that pure math is a fraud. I've read his research papers, and they weren't to unique or important. Nonetheless, the ideas were interesting but I like complex analysis so that's an expected opinion of such papers.

[Anonymous No.7469279]

>>7468966
This sums it up perfectly.

[Anonymous No.7469295]

Because they are all fucking retards, like every human ever.

[Anonymous No.7469309]

>>7469009
>Without love your life will just pass you by

That's cute. Was that on your Facebook feed today faggot?

[Anonymous No.7469314]

>>7468947
Cantor got depressed. He didn't do shit withdrawing from math.

Perelman hates most of the mathematical community so he quit his job and further isolated himself. I can understand as I left Comp Sci when I was 15, since I fucking hated most comp sci people.

Galois died, so he didn't lose interest.

For Kaczynski see >>7469278

Grothendieck's worldly pursuits were probably a result of how he was raised. He had anarchist parents. Perhaps he was dissatisfied with math, we don't really know.

[Anonymous No.7469317]

>>7468947
because the rabbit hole goes as deep as you can dig it

some of them run out of steam and some of them realize theres no end and give up

[Anonymous No.7469335]

this board has turned to shit and this thread is depressing af to see so much ignorance

[Anonymous No.7469338]

>>7469335
Where?

[Anonymous No.7469359]

>>7469314
I know Perelman is an eccentric, but what exactly miffed him about the math community? If I recall correctly he commented on how the Poincaré conjecture was already mostly proved from prior work which implies he probably thought that other mathematicians took too long to do anything with it.

[Anonymous No.7469361]

>>7469335
Then please enlighten us.

[Anonymous No.7469363]

>>7468966
being a consequentialist

[Anonymous No.7469366]

>>7469102
>The gun fight was over a girl
pussy always ruins everything

[Anonymous No.7469451]

Why frank yang

[Anonymous No.7469468]

>>7468947
Apparently Perelman quit because the field was too full of dishonest, egotistical autists.

Basically the same reason people stop browsing /sci/.

[Anonymous No.7469507]

>>7469314
>Cantor got depressed.

cause math wasn't satisfying him obviously. If math was good he'd be having fun and smiling from ear to ear. Apparently if you get smart like Cantor or Perelman or Grothendiek you realize the truth about math!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

>Galois died, so he didn't lose interest.

Galois quit his research and started becoming politically active, then died in a gun fight over a girl. Both things interested him more than math.

[Anonymous No.7469606]

:{

[Anonymous No.7469646]

>>7469507
>Galois quit his research and started becoming politically active

This is crap he wrote some of his best papers while he was locked up.

[Anonymous No.7469661]

>>7469646

no, this was after.
He gave his teachers crappy illegible work and basically became lazy, then just stopped focusing on math.

[Anonymous No.7469678]

>>7469102
>gave up math
lol nope
>Whatever the reasons behind the duel, Galois was so convinced of his impending death that he stayed up all night writing letters to his Republican friends and composing what would become his mathematical testament, the famous letter to Auguste Chevalier outlining his ideas, and three attached manuscripts.[14] Mathematician Hermann Weyl said of this testament, "This letter, if judged by the novelty and profundity of ideas it contains, is perhaps the most substantial piece of writing in the whole literature of mankind." However, the legend of Galois pouring his mathematical thoughts onto paper the night before he died seems to have been exaggerated.[4] In these final papers, he outlined the rough edges of some work he had been doing in analysis and annotated a copy of the manuscript submitted to the Academy and other papers.

[Anonymous No.7469702]

>>7469678
>the legend of Galois pouring his mathematical thoughts onto paper the night before he died seems to have been exaggerate

so he just rambled incoherently.

[Anonymous No.7469707]

>>7469661
Possion told him to gather together all his notebooks for his theory on polynomials, this was in April. He died the following May, literally less than a month later.

[Anonymous No.7469708]

Galois didn't devote himself to math because he had other talents and wanted chicks.

He was a terrible student, but genius at the same time. He was more interested in the politics of his time than clearing up his math ideas

[Anonymous No.7469711]

>>7469708

Ya, Galois devoted himself 50% to politics, 40% to girls, and 10% to math.

Weird guy, but smart, math is really unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Without love life is pointless

[Anonymous No.7469715]

>>7469702
Or so ignorant people might say.

[Anonymous No.7469728]

would fug his boipuss tbh

[Anonymous No.7469809]

What do mathematicians even contribute to society besides teaching math any way? And dont give me that crap about how you can use math to solve real world problems. People only use math managing money MAYBE predicting the weather. Thats all. Math isnt as useful like its advertised in cartoons or movies.

[Anonymous No.7469811]

>>7469809
Kek.

[Anonymous No.7469815]

>>7469809
You are right, the number people who will use math can be counted in a few thousand hands,but so is the number of people who will use physics and chemistry.

Most people will never need to use any advanced knowlegde beyond knowing how to sum and subtract.

Any problem only needs to be solved once and to be turned into an algorithm.

[Anonymous No.7469838]

>>7469092
But Grothendieck didn't lose his creativity, he was just bitter and fed up with the academic milieu. But he kept innovating after he left.

[Anonymous No.7469850]

>>7469314
>left coz i hated most comp sci ppl
cool story bro

[Anonymous No.7469880]

>>7469278
kazcynski wasnt a genius?
>youngest math professor at the time
>was doing groundbreaking math
youre fucking retarded

[Anonymous No.7470003]

>>7469678

topkek, Republicans ruin everything, and their best is Trump

[Anonymous No.7470028]

I think the unsatisfactory comes, in parts, from other mathematicians being autist or yourself being an autist - so you don't connect to the world like some livelong artist would.

[Anonymous No.7470408]

>>7469880
His math wasn't groundbreaking. Read his papers. Age doesn't mean shit in math after you're 18 or 19 years old.

[Anonymous No.7470628]

>>7470408
your standards are far too high, you're just butthurt because he hated mathematics and called it "useless abstraction"

[Anonymous No.7470651]

>>7469314
>I left Comp Sci when I was 15

So did you quit halfway through your codecademy.com Python tutorial series? Or did you never finish publishing your first HTML page? What happened?

[Anonymous No.7470669]

>>7468986
I agree with this.

[Anonymous No.7470734]

>>7470628
No. I'm not butthurt. I agree with Kaczynski. And my standards of great are probably normal.

>>7470651
I was frustrated with people, not with programming and coding. And I never did HTML design or python scripting, my coding was mostly with physics and number crunching.

>>7469359
See Wikipedia. He told The New Yorker that he's disappointed that math is full of conformists and those who tolerate the dishonest.

[Anonymous No.7470749]

>>7470734
>>7470628
>>7470408
>>7469880
>>7469278
>>7468947

He was brilliant and professors said that while others in their classes were solving homework problems he was independently publishing papers without assistance. He was the best student at Michigan in his cohort and even better than his professors as he complained his professors couldn't even solve the problems they assigned and were ill-prepared for their own lectures. Berkeley's department thought he was so bright that he would have been tenured today if he had stayed and he most likely would have done work outside of his PhD thesis. In Ted's own words "Meanwhile, I was doing well in mathematics. It was fun to solve mathematical problems, but in a deeper sense mathematics was boring and empty because for me it had no purpose. If I had worked on applied mathematics I would have contributed to the development of the technological society that I hated, so I worked only on pure mathematics. But pure mathematics was only a game. I did not understand then, and I still do not understand, why mathematicians are content to fritter away their whole lives in a mere game. I myself was completely dissatisfied with such a life. I knew what I wanted: to go and live in some wild place."

[Anonymous No.7470752]

>>7470749
Anyway, I think what he did was terrible and he wasted tremendous talent.

[Anonymous No.7470753]

>>7470749

Funny how an insane dude like Ted could easily see why pure math is just a silly game, sudoku tier rubbish at the end of the day.

Yet so many "brilliant" autists like T Tao can't see this fact, and waste their lives with it.

[Anonymous No.7470765]

>>7469278
"Once, as Math Prof. George Piranian told author Alton Chase, Piranian told his students that he had a problem about a lesser-known mathematical subject called boundary functions that no one had solved. Weeks later, Kaczynski placed 100 handwritten pieces of paper on Piranian's desk. He had solved the problem.

Kaczynski's academic prowess peaked with his doctoral dissertation, titled "Boundary Functions." The dissertation was awarded the Sumner Myers prize for the University's best mathematics thesis of the year, netting Kaczynski $100. A plaque listing his accomplishment is still displayed near the East Quad Residence Hall entrance. If you Google "boundary functions" name now, the third result is an excerpt from Kaczynski's thesis.

Every professor on his dissertation committee approved it.

"This thesis is the best I have ever directed," Shields wrote in an evaluation form."

[Anonymous No.7470768]

>>7470749
So someone who does better than his professors and decides to focus in one hyperspecialized area like most postdocs do before burning out or becoming complacent like most professors (and thus not producing anything more of interest)?

Also I've read the quote. I agree, except with the technological society crap, since I don't give two shits about his ideology.

He certainly was a smart guy though.

[Anonymous No.7470770]

>>7470753
He was nuts for sure. I think he wasted his brilliant brain on senseless murder, but yeah I don't see how autist like the uselessness of pure math either.

[Anonymous No.7470774]

>>7470768
I meant to end the question with "is a genius"

[Anonymous No.7470777]

>>7470770
He wasn't really great at murdering though.

Good at not getting caught though.

[Anonymous No.7470782]

>>7470768
He was producing brilliant work without the assistance of his advisor as a graduate student. That is unheard of from most students, even from very bright ones. He wasn't a very good professor though and his students complained about him but Berkeley didn't care. Teaching is one of those things that can be improved on, they just wanted a star faculty member. But little did they know they hired a bright guy with a lot of mental problems.

[Anonymous No.7470840]

>>7470782
>But little did they know they hired a bright guy with a lot of mental problems.

What mental problems did he have?

[Anonymous No.7470844]

>>7470753
what's wrong with pure math and what is the good math?

[Anonymous No.7470845]

>>7470840
unabomber.

[Anonymous No.7470894]

>>7470845

how is that a mental problem and not simply a poor decision?

[Anonymous No.7470925]

>>7470894
why was that a poor decision when his full article was published in a major newspaper?

[Anonymous No.7470933]

>>7470925

killing innocent people is a poor decision, even if your article gets published.

Not sure what this has to do with "mental illness" though. People that are perfectly sane and mentally healthy make bad decisions sometimes.

[Anonymous No.7470937]

>>7470933
from his worldview, they were not innocents

[Anonymous No.7470943]

>>7470937

but it was really dumb because it was ineffective at producing the change he wanted. Totally impotent, like a Christian fundie killing an abortion doctor's secretary thinking it'll start some global anti-abortion revolution.

Totally ineffective and misplaced frustration = poor decision.

He might've been good at math sudoku puzzles, but when it came to real life matters he was completely autistic and had low-intelligence.

[Anonymous No.7470958]

>>7470943
He is a popular guy in prison actually. Far from socially retarded, just kinda a mad man obviously.

[Anonymous No.7470971]

>>7470958

most people in prison are socially retarded. so it's not surprising he has made some friends there

[Anonymous No.7470972]

>>7470958
>>7470943
propaganda agent

we are having a mad men war over there

[Anonymous No.7470974]

>>7470971
If you're thinking he's friends with a pack of hoodlums I doubt it. His mail correspondences suggest otherwise, too.

[Anonymous No.7470977]

>>7470972
I use mad man synonymously with evil villain, because he fits the stereotype. I'm not the abortion commenter.

[Anonymous No.7470983]

>>7470977
what if you support a worldview which turn out to be as evil?

mad mens always notice it too late