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Comment by tomjen2 | Hacker News Reader

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" ;]

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

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.

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!

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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