[lanstin]

Funny contrast to me. I finished getting my kids up into college using my "useful enough to others to be paid for it" software skills and immediately went back to grad school for math precisely because it is such a joyous activity. Why would one eliminate a consistent source of transcendent pleasure from your life in this hard hard universe full of suffering and death?

And I have to say my training in low dimensional topology and mathematical techniques as a youngster was extremely useful for developing software and software systems.

Practical knowledge has a tendency to overfit and overfit in a society where change of technologies and techniques is as high as it's ever been.

[makr17]

Reminds me of one of my Maths professors in college, Ben Freedman. He was a writer and an engineer until his son Michael started asking math questions that dad couldn't answer. So he went back for his PhD in his 40s. Michael ultimately won a Fields Medal.

[barfbagginus]

That enlightened activity is funded in part because it frequently yields massive military benefits/massive benefits to other exploitive technologies. There's currently no way to control that as a Mathematician, unless you're publishing in an anti establishment mathematical activism cell, in which case you public mathematical career is halted.

Very few mathematians want to become political enemies of the state, but that's what they're forced to do if they want to rise to this principle. I guarantee that takes away some of the enlightened wonder, and adds back a lot of genuine terror and boring bullshit.