Is mathematics a young man's game?

[jk]

...
40 years ago I was unloading meat from a truck at $4/hour. When I finally made the commitment to become as good a mathematician as I could, my intellectual journey began. Once you start on the path, many people will assist you, because they have all gone on the same search.
...
.

$4/hour was good pay 40 years ago...equivalent to 22/hr today. This roughly translates to $40,000 per year..better than a lot of postdoc salaries

 

[tclos]

People who are really talented at an early age are born with it. I'm not sure of your situation, but you would know by now. Even if you are not born with it, it takes years of patience and hard work (sometimes a decade or more) to achieve greatness (it also depends on what your definition of 'greatness' is). However, I would seriously consider counseling if your self worth is solely determined by your mathematical abilities.

 

[ivan77]

A couple of things come to mind:

“Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work...”
― Albert Einstein

second, I've heard a thousand times before that you shouldn't choose a career path because of the money, do it because you love it.

Wanting to be a professional mathematician because you want to win awards is going for the money.

Also, I find it kind of strange that you suggest that the theoretical physics community admonishes those who break from the status quo when the most revered in that community are precisley those who introduce some kind of a disruptive concept.

 

[mheslep]

This sounds appropriate:

Feynman zinger for the NAS!

 

[nazarbaz]

Kant, one of the greatest philosophical minds ever, wrote his first interesting piece at the age of 57... The most precious thing you can reach in our professions is to develop a perspective of your own, a new way to look at things... It is very hard and, for most of us, dangerous, both on a personal and professional levels... I doubt you can reach it when you only want it... You must have to... It can't be an act of "free will" and it can't be a mere result of some "inner qualities"...
In humanities, the world must shake around you when you are thinking if you do not intend to mainstream and to reproduce the same intellectual clichés that you despise in the litterature... I can understand that ambition... Though, doing it for fame is just ridiculous... People who look for this kind of psychological and social rewards are the true failures... True genius does not need others recognition... It doesn't even depend on you to attribute yourself some merit in it...
Genius reveals what is bigger than us...

 

[mheslep]

A couple of things come to mind:

“Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work...”
― Albert Einstein

...

And predating Einstein:

“Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have is this. When I have a subject in mind. I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it... the effort which I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.”

Alexander Hamilton

 

[mathwonk]

That's why I was doing it jk, I couldn't live on my postdoc salary. And every day I was expected to carry off 80,000 pounds of meat, each piece weighing from 150 to 300 pounds while sliding in slippery fat. I definitely earned it. And there was one homicide per year among my 15 or so peers.

You have pointed exactly the choice I faced: continue doing that until I was as old and bent down as the men around me, some still lugging at the same pay in their 50's, assuming I was one of the ones not murdered sooner or sent to prison,

or try another career. The postdoc pay was indeed less at first, but now I am retired on a pension not offered to former luggers. Obviously no one goes into research for the postdoc pay. You have to look past that. If you can't, then research is not for you. I'm not saying its an easy or lucrative life. I'm just observing it is not impossible for someone gifted who really knows he wants it.

In 1981 I was an NSF postdoc at Harvard working for $15,000/year, to support a family of 4 in Harvard square, and that's after getting a PhD and winning a prize offered only to 10 top young researchers per year. But it was worth it to me.

This thread has never been about the competitiveness of academic pay, only whether it is too late or too far out of reach for the OP. He didn't ask whether it was preferable to private industry. For many people that would be "no". But thanks for brining it up. I would not want to encourage him to pursue a career he would later regret.

 

[jk]

You are absolutely right