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This largely ignores the fact that research is 90% reading papers (or doing lab work in less pure fields) and trying to come up with something. Fighting for money, writing papers, producing graphs/charts, etc. Pure maths research is undeniably simpler, but not that much. Look at HoTT (homotopy type theory), or reverse maths (https://github.com/ericastor/rmzoo/). These are sufficiently close to programming - because they are largely composed of programming tasks. Furthermore, researchers usually don't do work alone, they are usually enrolled in some kind of a program, with a supervisor, mentor, guide, or at least a program/faculty chair. And even if they are totally on their own, they can start doing work on unsolved problems. Usually people new to research start by doing a survey paper for a certain field, to get an overview of recent and past progress and problems, solutions and techniques. Oh, and this also applies: https://78.media.tumblr.com/41b40230404ccfd7af8a0146ea6689d3... Yes, 99.9% of programmers would never become the next Tao, cranking out blog posts, books, polymath papers, lectures and otherwise results every few days/months, but that doesn't mean they couldn't do pure maths research. But luckily they don't have to. Because it's a very different realm than programming. (Or even protocol design, IETF work, low level microcode work, or run of the mill mobile apps.) |
