# Have any mathmeticians ever become millionaires?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [November 14, 2003, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270 "2003-11-14T17:43:54Z")
**Posts on this page:** 19
**Page:** 5
### Author:  [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)
#### Post date: [June 22, 2016, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/81 "2016-06-22T13:54:08Z")
> [@andrewm](#):
>
> Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman (designers of the [RSA encryption algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem))) are surely all well beyond millionaire status by now. Cryptographers are specialized mathematicians.
Actually, they are all Computer Scientists. And many, many Computer Scientists do _not_ consider themselves Mathematicians. (Myself included.) It’s akin to deeming all Chemists as specialized Physicists.
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### Author:  [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)
#### Post date: [June 22, 2016, 1:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/82 "2016-06-22T13:59:48Z")
> [@Chronos](#):
>
> **Nava** , you have no idea how much I’m cringing at that story.
Sorry… :o
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### Author:  [@sbunny8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sbunny8)
#### Post date: [June 22, 2016, 2:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/83 "2016-06-22T14:38:19Z")
FWIW, Jonathan Quayle Higgins III was a “doctor of mathematics” and he once claimed to be Robin Masters, the millionaire. Does that count? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnum,\_P.I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnum,_P.I).
On a more serious note, I’ve read books on the history of mathematics which describe various mathematicians’ attempts to apply their knowledge to win state lotteries. In particular, French mathematicians occasionally found weaknesses to exploit in the state lotteries in the 1700s, before the authorities figured out they were being beaten and fought back by adjusting the rules of the games. Put simply, **the house always wins** , but there have been rare times in the distant past when that wasn’t true. According to wikipedia, Voltaire got rich by investing in a lottery scheme cooked up by a mathematician around 1729. There’s no mention of whether the mathematician got rich though. [Voltaire - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire#Great_Britain)
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### Author:  [@JacobSwan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JacobSwan)
#### Post date: [June 22, 2016, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/84 "2016-06-22T14:51:19Z")
Did Roger Penrose make much money from the toilet roll copyright case? I know he made them destroy the remaining rolls, but did they have to pay him a % of profits?
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### Author:  [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)
#### Post date: [June 22, 2016, 5:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/85 "2016-06-22T17:42:37Z")
> [@JacobSwan](#):
>
> Did Roger Penrose make much money from the toilet roll copyright case? I know he made them destroy the remaining rolls, but did they have to pay him a % of profits?
OK.
What’s all this then?
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### Author:  [@davidm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/davidm)
#### Post date: [June 22, 2016, 7:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/86 "2016-06-22T19:26:45Z")
> [@Leo\_Bloom](#):
>
> OK.
>
> What’s all this then?
This also aroused my curiosity so I googled it.
[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB860978392483692000](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB860978392483692000)
> [@](#):
>
> When Sir Roger examined the “Kleenex quilted toilet tissue,” made by the British unit of Kimberly-Clark Corp. , what he saw was no ordinary piece of toilet paper. Embossed on the surface he discovered a series of interlocking diamonds. They bore an uncanny resemblance to “the Penrose Pattern,” a highly complex geometric formula he devised in the 1970s to prove that a nonrepeating pattern could exist, solving one of the great conundrums of the natural world.
> …
> Sir Roger’s writ argues that making the tissue fluffier allows manufacturers to reduce the amount of paper used on each roll. But if the pattern repeats itself, the tissue would likely bunch up, looking unattractive. That can be corrected using a Penrose-type pattern, which lets the paper sit evenly on the roll, the suit contends.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [June 22, 2016, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/87 "2016-06-22T20:52:22Z")
No, **Nava** , you don’t need to apologize. My cringing is much more at your teacher’s role in that than yours.
**ftg** , there are many different things that get called “computer science”. But the computer science that Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman were doing is absolutely a branch of mathematics.
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### Author:  [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2016, 1:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/88 "2016-06-23T01:20:38Z")
joema writes:
\> Tom Lehrer, songwriter-parodist. Taught mathematics at Harvard.
No, he didn’t teach at Harvard (except possibly as a teaching assistant while a grad student). He did both his bachelor’s and his master’s degrees in math there. He tried for a Ph.D. but never got it. His main teaching career was only part-time, and it was at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He also taught statistics to political science students at MIT for a while.
\> Paul Vanhoeven, Hollywood film director. Phd in mathematics.
His last name is Verhoeven. His degree is the equivalent of a master’s degree. It was in math and physics.
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### Author:  [@joema](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/joema)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2016, 1:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/89 "2016-06-23T01:52:11Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#):
>
> …No, he didn’t teach at Harvard (except possibly as a teaching assistant while a grad student).
[https://ww3.haverford.edu/physics/songs/lehrer/lehrer.htm](https://ww3.haverford.edu/physics/songs/lehrer/lehrer.htm)
“he has taught undergraduate math courses at the Harvard Business School, MIT, Wellesley, and U.C. Santa Cruz.”
> **[Whatever Happened to Tom Lehrer? - The American Spectator | USA News and...](https://spectator.org/33723_whatever-happened-tom-lehrer/)**
>
> Most people assume that Tom Lehrer is dead, just as he has always wished us to think. Lehrer is by no means dead, but he turns 85 this month. After he retired
“That success struck early, when he was still teaching math at Harvard”
> **[Tom Lehrer | News | The Harvard Crimson](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1981/11/9/tom-lehrer-pbrbumors-to-the-contrary/)**
>
> R UMORS TO THE CONTRARY notwithstanding, Tom Lehrer is not now and never has been dead. Of course, he's heard
"One Harvard professor, for whom Lehrer was a teaching fellow, remembers Lehrer this way. “He was Tom Lehrer, world celebrity, the most famous member of the Math department”
> **[Tom Lehrer’s Mathematically and Scientifically Inclined Singing and...](https://www.openculture.com/2013/04/tom_lehrer_math_animated.html)**
>
> I went through childhood listening to Tom Lehrer's 'New Math'. The 1965 song, performed in part like standard spoken-word comedy, made me laugh every time.
‘he holds degrees in mathematics from Harvard, has co-authored such papers as “Random walks with restraining barrier as applied to the biased binary counter” and “The distribution of the number of locally maximal elements in a random sample”’
[http://www.casualhacker.net/tom.lehrer/jmazner/lehrhtml.html](http://www.casualhacker.net/tom.lehrer/jmazner/lehrhtml.html)
“Lehrer held teaching appointments at MIT, Harvard and Wellesley, worked for several defense contractors (including the Atomic Energy Commission’s nuclear laboratory in Los Alamos)”
\> Paul Vanhoeven, Hollywood film director. Phd in mathematics.
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#):
>
> His last name is Verhoeven. His degree is the equivalent of a master’s degree. It was in math and physics.
You are right it may not be a Phd in contemporary western systems and it was in math and physics. However it’s less clear that describing as Phd is wrong in the context of that period. This was discussed in detail on [mathforum.org](http://mathforum.org) which I quote below.
[http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=4749581](http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=4749581)
“actually the information is nearly correct. What he did do
in the Netherlands was called a “doctoraal examen”. At that time in the
Netherlands a university study consisted of three parts. The first part
lead to the “kandidaats examen” (candidate’s exam). After that followed
the study to the “doctoraal examen” (doctor’s exam). When you had done
that you had formally finished your study and you could use the title
“drs.” (doctorandus), or “mr.” (meester) (when it was in law). After that
you could prolongue your study with your “proefschrift” (PhD thesis) that
you had to defend in public. This prolongation consisted _only_ of
writing your thesis. Once defended and permitted you were allowed to use
the title “dr.” (doctor). This was called “promotion”. In many cases
the writing of the thesis was done while already employed in some function
elsewhere (and many times consisted only of a collection of published
articles), so it was actually not part of the university curriculum (and
I think still is not). The thesis by Paul Verhoeven (on relativity) was
a thesis required for his “doctoraal examen”, but there was no public
hearing about it, it needed only submission and acceptance.”
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2016, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/90 "2016-06-23T02:30:28Z")
In other words, that corresponds to a master’s degree. In the US also, the difference between the MS and the PhD is almost entirely in the writing of the thesis. But it’s misleading to say “only writing your thesis”, because a doctoral thesis is more work than all of the classes that come before it.
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### Author:  [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2016, 6:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/91 "2016-06-23T06:47:05Z")
Yes, I’m aware that there are some websites that speak of him teaching at Harvard. They’re wrong or at least very inaccurate. This is a sloppy description of his life that got established early and repeated in various articles since then. His teaching career was mostly done at UC Santa Cruz. From 1972 to 2001 he taught two courses each year, one that was an introductory course in math for non-mathematicians and one that was about musical theater. He was a part-time, non-tenure-track teacher there all those years and has been retired from teaching since then. He taught statistics to political science students at MIT from 1962 to 1972, apparently. This was also a non-tenure-track job and possibly also a part-time job.
He was an undergraduate at Harvard from 1943 to 1946 and then a grad student from 1946 to 1953. He worked for a company called Baird-Atomic from 1953 to 1955 and was in the army from 1955 to 1957. Various websites speak of him working at Los Alamos National Laboratory and teaching at Wellesley, which apparently was in the time between 1957 and 1962. One website speaks of him teaching at Harvard Business School, apparently in that same five-year period. Any teaching he did at Wellesley and Harvard Business School (if he did teach there) was, like his ten years teaching at MIT, certainly non-tenure-track, probably just some low-level statistics courses for non-mathematicians, and possibly part-time. After 1957, he made some money from his records and his concerts, so he didn’t need a full-time job. I’m don’t know if he’s really a millionaire. He has never been anything except a cult artist, so it’s hard to say how much he’s worth. If he was taking in enough money each year from his music that he could have lived on it, why didn’t he just do that after 1957? It may well be that he has never made enough money in music to live on.
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### Author:  [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2016, 8:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/92 "2016-06-23T08:09:39Z")
> [@Chronos](#):
>
> No, **Nava** , you don’t need to apologize. My cringing is much more at your teacher’s role in that than yours.
If it helps, a detail I forgot to mention is that everybody involved was in college (ages 22 and above). No kids anywhere.
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### Author:  [@JacobSwan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JacobSwan)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2016, 11:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/93 "2016-06-23T11:12:45Z")
> [@Leo\_Bloom](#):
>
> OK.
>
> What’s all this then?
Sorry, I thought it was quite well known, which is why I didn’t include a link.
I’m not sure what he was most upset about; people making money from his patent; or people literally wiping their bottoms with his maths!
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### Author:  [@Jesta](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jesta)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2016, 11:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/94 "2016-06-23T11:22:32Z")
Although I’m not 100% sure of the educations finally achieved, these two have made their money based around numbers…
“He was a Commerce and Law student of the University of Tasmania, studying tax, finance and banking,”
> **[Zeljko Ranogajec](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeljko_Ranogajec)**
>
> Zeljko Ranogajec (born 22 May 1961) is a businessman and professional gambler from Australia. The London-based Ranogajec is known for horse betting, blackjack and other forms of advantage gambling.
> Ranogajec was born in Hobart, Australia, in a family of Croatian immigrants. He was a Commerce and Law student of the University of Tasmania, studying tax, finance and banking, when he began card counting in Blackjack at the Wrest Point Casino. While there, Ranogajec met his future wife and busines...
“He attended Dominic College, and the University of Tasmania, where he briefly studied mathematics and computer science in 1979”
> **[David Walsh (art collector)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Walsh_(art_collector))**
>
> David Dominic Walsh AO (born 1961) is an Australian professional gambler, art collector and businessman. He is the owner of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) and Moorilla Estate.
> Walsh grew up in a Roman Catholic family in the Glenorchy district of Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, the youngest of three children. He attended Dominic College, and the University of Tasmania, where he briefly studied mathematics and computer science in 1979. Walsh made his fortune by developing a gambling system ...
Random quotes
" Zeljko Ranogajec was soon recognized as another mathematical genius"
" David Walsh – Tasmanian, mathematician, gambler and museum owner"
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### Author:  [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2016, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/95 "2016-06-23T12:48:15Z")
Oh, one more thing about Tom Lehrer: He was off and on a grad student (mostly part-time, even when he was actually doing anything) at Harvard between 1946 and 1965. In 1965 he gave up any hope that he would ever get his Ph.D. We know where he was teaching (mostly part-time) between 1962 and 2001. So even if he somehow taught at Harvard between 1946 and 1965, he was a grad student at the same time. I can’t see Harvard hiring him except as a part-time, non-tenure-track teacher to temporarily fill in on some low-level classes if he was also a grad student there.
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### Author:  [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2016, 12:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/96 "2016-06-23T12:54:05Z")
> [@JacobSwan](#):
>
> Sorry, I thought it was quite well known, which is why I didn’t include a link.
>
> I’m not sure what he was most upset about; people making money from his patent; or people literally wiping their bottoms with his maths!
[🙂 Side note: I didn’t know you’re a Brit (I’m guessing from “maths”) but it’s amusing because the “what’s all this then” in my head was spoken by an English beat cop as a challenge, as seen in movies. I don’t think Americans really use it commonly.
Do they say “beat cop” in England?]
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### Author:  [@JacobSwan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JacobSwan)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2016, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/97 "2016-06-23T13:35:02Z")
> [@Leo\_Bloom](#):
>
> [🙂 Side note: I didn’t know you’re a Brit (I’m guessing from “maths”) but it’s amusing because the “what’s all this then” in my head was spoken by an English beat cop as a challenge, as seen in movies. I don’t think Americans really use it commonly.
>
> Do they say “beat cop” in England?]
I’m British and detest the word ‘math’.
We’d say Bobby or Beat Bobby, maybe Copper. It’s supposed to originate from Robert Peel who founded the first modern police force.
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### Author:  [@muttrox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/muttrox)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2016, 8:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/98 "2016-06-23T20:42:59Z")
I think this question misses the most common path for mathematicians to be millionaires.
Data Scientists are highly mathematical. Every week or two there is another article in a major publication about how it more or less the best profession to be in. We hire analysts out of college at six figures.[Quora says starting salary is $120,000](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-salary-of-a-data-scientist). Plug in “Big Data”, even a little higher. It doesn’t take long to be a millionaire at these salaries.
Whether comp sci, statistics, data science, or pure mathematics – anyone with highly developed math skills who chooses to apply that skill in the business world will be richly compensated. Every company that uses data (and every company is using data!) is frantically looking for people who can leverage that data (i.e. math skills), and there just aren’t enough of them.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2016, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-any-mathmeticians-ever-become-millionaires/213270/99 "2016-06-23T21:20:26Z")
As an aside related to that, there was a time back in the 70s when oil companies were offering six-figure starting salaries to relativists. Not that there’s any relativity involved in the oil industry, of course, but exploring for oil involves a lot of tensor calculus, and relativists are the pros at tensor calculus (honestly, we’re not sure why all the other folks who work with tensors make them so hard).
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