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And I am outraged by their dinosaur mindset and the gatekeeping mentality that force every student to follow their same archaic system that no longer makes sense 20 years ago, let alone now.

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What do you suggest? Giving money to the aspiring intelligence gatekeepers and IP thieves with trillion dollar valuations?

Reform the way math is taught and researched. Right now, the aspiring mathematicians have to follow a ritual and system for 15+ years: undergrad -> PhD -> postdoc -> faculty, specializing on very narrow fields and god forbid if they have even a slight interest in quantitative finance. You could go through 4 years of undergrad classroom and had no idea what research math is (even at top schools like MIT, Harvard or Stanford), how it's done, etc. and the people who do it are typically the one "already in the system" (e.g. parents are professors, or in academia, or have connections to do research).

In the age of AI, there's no reason one has to follow the kind of classes like Algebra, Topology or PDE. Teach just enough so that good students can understand the basic, and go straight into seminar and research math. I don't think a top student in sophomore year cannot understand or work on some combinatorics research problem and get some results, with proper mentoring and guidance.

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