[williamstein]

I was a tenured mathematics professor in academia (at UCSD and Univ of Washington) from 2005-2019, and a full professor during the last few years. At 45, I left academia and started a small tech company, giving up tenure and the academic life. It has worked out for me so far, though it often felt like my instincts from academia are almost exactly backwards from the correct instincts for industry. Anyway, leaving the "golden handcuffs" of tenure was probably a somewhat unusual part for me. I tried very hard to stay X% with the university, but the intellectual property and other rules were too rigid to make that work for more than 2-3 years, even though the mathematics department was extremely supportive. My motivation for leaving academia was my inability to get funding to support development of open source software (in particular, SageMath), and I still aspire to one day create more value and have a bigger impact than I could in academia.

[tsingy]

Oh my god, SageMath helped me so much when learning mathematics. Thank you, so so much you for the amazing work you've put in, the world needs more people like you.