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Comment by Moshe_Silnorin | Hacker News Reader

Does he consider himself a failure? Some percentage of very intelligent people just don't care about "success". They have rich inner lives and hobbies and interesting friends, if they can find some. It could be that he's found a job that doesn’t cause him much stress, that he excels at compared to his colleagues, and allows him to pay for the pleasures of being alive. Much of pure math is the pursuit of difficult problems that may or may not be of any use to anyone. You ever hear this line: "Winning the Fields medal tells you two things about a person, that they were capable of achieving great things and that they didn't."

It's not clear to me that he would have contributed more to the world had he become some high-status academic.

Different goals lead to different outcomes, regardless of innate ability.

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One always has to look at the whole person to understand whether he performs relatively well or not. The guy I was talking about is extremely risk averse. That makes steep careers quite difficult. But all in all, he's probably a happy person. Another example: MENSA says I'm way inside the top 1% when it comes to IQ tests (I didn't want to say 'intelligence'). I don't think I'm in the top 1% most successful people in my current environment, but that's all right as I'm coming from a poor village from a postcommunist country, and everything that comes with it (lack of good education, etc.). So compared to that, I'm doing all right, but naturally it's very difficult to catch up with people who could go to Stanford or Oxford. Not because it's difficult to learn the 'hard science stuff' -- I interviewed many Oxbridge guys and they're not that better than the others when it comes to hard tech/science knowledge. However, they're much better in social skills, self-confidence, usually have better network, family connections, etc. And those things matter a lot.

And I'm a big believer of luck and randomness. Since I've got a kid I wonder how do we even survive, life is so risky, starting from the birth itself.

Anyway, I think perspective gives you more happiness. At least it did for me.

> And I'm a big believer of luck and randomness.

Indeed. Like, for example, being born with a high IQ?

Yes, absolutely. Brains, geolocation, family, this is all just blind luck.

>You ever hear this line: "Winning the Fields medal tells you two things about a person, that they were capable of achieving great things and that they didn't."

Would you mind explaining this a little bit more, please? I would imagine that significant or groundbreaking mathematical discoveries qualify as "great things" by someone's reckoning.

But not by the reckoning of whoever coined that phrase.

Most work in pure mathematics -- even outstandingly brilliant work done by outstandingly brilliant people -- is never useful outside pure mathematics. If you regard pure mathematics as very valuable in its own right, that's no problem. But if you care mostly about practical benefits, you might think that someone with the mental characteristics needed to win a Fields Medal would have done better to use that wonderful brain for something that benefits the world more.

(For my part, I'm glad that some people with wonderful brains use them to enrich pure mathematics, because I happen to love pure mathematics. But I think those more practically minded people have a point.)

>Most work in pure mathematics -- even outstandingly brilliant work done by outstandingly brilliant people -- is never useful outside pure mathematics.

Perhaps this is untrue on a timescale of decades or centuries.

Applications mine from pure math all the time. See this SO answer for a wide range of other fields' problems that were solved with pure math. I see things from cryptography, graphics, distributed computing, chemistry, ... http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/280530/can-you-provi...

The list is expansive if you care to look for it.

It's definitely true that there's a large quantity of pure mathematics that later turns out to be useful outside pure mathematics.

The question that's relevant here, though, is what fraction of pure mathematics is ever useful outside pure mathematics.

I think this would be difficult to measure. My guess: only a small fraction, but some of that turns out to be incredibly useful.

It's hard for me to understand the ratio of the relative body of work that turns out to be useful versus the relative body of work that hasn't seen application yet. Across all institutions, pure mathematics is an extremely small field; yet their papers have an (almost) infinite amount of time available to find an application.

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