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Comment by fph | Hacker News Reader

Despite the shortage, RAM is still cheaper than mathematicians.

It's also less frustrating to organize world wide ram production and logistics than to deal with a single mathematician.

Constantly sitting around trying to solve problems that nobody has made headway on for hundreds of years. Or inventing theorems around 15th century mysticism that won't be applicable for hundreds of years.

Now if you'll excuse me I need to multiply some numbers by 3 and divide them by 2 ... I'm so close guys.

The comment feels a bit like Verdex may have dated a mathematician at some point and it went sour.

I don't know, I think if you weighed up the costs of AI related datacentre spend vs. the average mathematics academic's salary you could come to a different conclusion.

Raising, nurturing, training, and mentoring an expert mathematician is not cheap; it never was, perhaps the first time in history when we can witness that rule to change - spinning up a bunch of math-savvy agents, each smarter than Ramanujan maybe will get too cheap.

You dont have to raise them, someone already did it, you have to hire them

You're oversimplifying the message I'm trying to convey. "you just hire them, someone already raised them" - treats mathematicians as a commodity stock rather than a flow. The conversation frames it as "mathematicians vs. RAM" - a cost comparison. But that's like comparing the cost of a GPS unit vs. a ship captain. The captain isn't expensive because they can calculate routes; they're expensive because they know when the route is wrong. AI makes the math cheaper but makes the mathematician more valuable, at least until true AGI genuinely surpasses human mathematical creativity - at which point we have much bigger economic questions than mathematician salaries.

The topic on itself is quite interesting, and far complex than supply/demand norms. Even before AI, there was and both wasn't shortage of mathematicians - academic pure mathematics - there's a glut. High school teachers - people exist; but they won't work for teacher salaries. Applied math - acute shortage - quant finance, ML research, cryptography, pharmaceutical modeling - we don't have enough. NSA - always struggled to hire - private sector salaries pull people away. Interdisciplinary - mathematical biology, climate modeling, materials science - domains where math is the bottleneck but the job title isn't really "mathematician" - acute shortage.

Doubt it. You have to pay these mathematicians once and then you can deploy to millions of sites.

But not everyone has to pay mathematicians, like RAM :-)

At the same time, processing is much cheaper than memory

Without memory you have no data to compute on. Memory and compute scaling only makes sense in tandem.

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