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Comment by amichail | Hacker News Reader

If someone is smart enough to play chess at the highest levels, wouldn't he/she be better off as a mathematician?

Is there any evidence that there is a strong correlation between playing chess at a high level and being a great mathematician?

If you are a great chess player you wouldn't have time to become a decent mathematician.

In my experience mathematicians become quite good at chess - if they take it seriously. That's why I gave up playing long time ago.

In my experience, anyone of average intelligence becomes quite good at chess, if they take it seriously.

being "smart enough" in chess translates to being "smart enough" in purely mechanical aspects of mathematics. imho, you are underestimating the creative aspect of mathematics.

Is there no similar translation between the creative aspects of chess and mathematics?

Karpov spent a year (I think) studying math as a freshman... "He couldn't make it" as the story goes.

Not really, a mathematician would likely make less money than a toplevel chess player.

But the falloff is sharp. A friend of mine was once ranked 44th in the world, and he switched to programming because he couldn't make a living playing chess.

Fat chance. There's only perhaps a few dozen people in the world who can actually even make a living playing chess (as opposed to teaching it on the side.) It's notoriously difficult.

Many American chess players switch to poker or a different profession.

Even then, I remember seeing ads for lessons by Gata Kamsky in the back of Chess Life about 8 years ago.

According to James Simons, "The average annual income of leading research mathematicians (those, say, with at least three articles in the Annals of Mathematics) is about 10,000,000 USD" ;]

Simons is worth several billions ($10 billion perhaps?) and the number of mathematicians with at least 3 articles in the Annals of Mathematics cannot be huge (1000 perhaps?). I am pretty sure that was what Simons was getting at. Seeing your smiley, I assume you knew that too!

I'm skeptical of that. There is one web site (besides the above comment) that has this quote. It links to the Wikipedia article about James Simons as its source. The Wikipedia article does not seem to mention the quote. Even if James Simons did say that, I'd like to see his source.

Edit: it just occurred to me that, since we are talking about "average" and not "median", this may as well be true, if a handful of mathematicians make a gazillion dollars a year. Very senior faculty members in the top research universities in the US are likely to make only $200-500k per year.

"Only," but that's ten times what a professional chessplayer outside of the top 10 in the world makes.

that's because Simons defines "leading" mathematicians as ones working for RenTech

Not really. Only a handful of top-level chess players are in the multi-million dollar range, while there are thousands of mathematicians in that range (the majority from the financial industry).

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