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Comment by otoburb | Hacker News Reader

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought mathematics was one of the few areas of study where one could noodle away on a problem or area with little in the way of supporting or expensive infrastructure.

As most on this site can probably attest to, one of the biggest issues with part-time/hobby/side projects is motivation and discipline. That problem seems to be already partially solved by the freedom to pick an area of mathematics one is already interested in.

Not having enough time to devote to a problem part-time doesn't seem like a large problem if somebody wants to work on problems of their own choosing as per the OP. Thus, my confusion.

I can definitely see that collaboration is a tougher nut to crack unless most participation starts shifting to evening group meetings.

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> ...mathematics was one of the few areas of study where one could noodle away ... with little ... infrastructure.

The New Yorker had an interesting article about Yitang Zhang and his discovery concerning bounded primes. The discovery itself is interesting for the mathematics involved, but of wider interest is that up until this discovery, he was a relative unknown in the mathematical establishment.

If it were simply a question of motivation and discipline to have math as a hobby, we would expect discoveries from unknown individuals more frequently, but, alas, that's not true, which is what makes this story precious.

It stems from the fact, among other things, that math isn't like programming. It's not like deciding, one day, that you want to write your own operating system, and then the small matter of coding it up. Math requires* those leaps of intuition that come to you after banging your head against the same problem for months. Most employers would start to question a developer's continued employment if it took them five months to resolve a single ticket.

*http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/pursuit-beauty

You can, but...

Some do actually use supercomputers to do mathematics.

Most however, thrive in an actual academic environment including spending a lot of time interacting with other mathematicians and going to conferences. There's a big difference between living in an academic environment and spending your whole life thinking about math and being around people who do the same... and working a 9-5 and doing a little math on the side. Not to say it isn't possible, but most reasonable jobs don't leave much left over mental energy for doing maths.

Yeah, and it's hard to get exposure to areas that might be fertile for inquiry if you aren't spending time with other people who are working on mathematics. It's a social networking effect, in the same way that you pick up programming tricks and get exposure to new frameworks/languages/techniques by spending time with other developers.

I'm sure there is a sizable number of "amateur" mathematicians who work on problems in their free time, but it is hard to know what to work on and where to look.

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