“HFT operations”?
Also, please don’t stop on the “who’s smarter” stuff. It was just getting good…
Chronos is right, there’s no way to compare … at least not fairly …
What was whispered in the silvering basements and isolated hilltops was that “those who got C’s in calculus went on to be biologists, those who got B’s became chemists, those with A’s became physicists … and those students asked to come up and teach the calculus class became astronomers.”
High-frequency trading.
Well, it’s certainly true that physicists use a lot more calculus than chemists, and chemists use more than biologists. But calculus is not the entirety of intelligence.
“silvering basements”?
Something with mirrors? Prints? Drug-taking?
ETA: All of the above?
But it is a stumbling block for some … especially people who struggled through Algebra … I know many really smart people and some of them just don’t “get” college math. I helped a dental student pass calculus and I know for a fact he didn’t understand it … but he passed and probably will never see it again his whole career.
It’s about public perception … if one says they’re an accounts receivable clerk … that’s kinda “meh” … one says they’re a mathematician … that’s more of an “oh really, can you fix my computer?”
Andrew Beal, worth greater than $10 billion. http://www.forbes.com/profile/andrew-beal/
You point your telescope straight up, unhook the mirror and lower it down into the basement … clean, polish and re-silver … crank the mirror back up and reattach to telescope … little bit of columnating and it’s like new eyeglasses.
I’m not even a mathematician and back in the Dark Ages I turned out to be ridiculously quick at beating a poker game several of my teachers (all male) and a bunch of male students hadn’t been able to beat in months of trying.
It was strip poker: since my brain functions are immune to the sight of boobs, I was able to analyze the game’s patterns beyond the point where the yellow chick took her shirt off (the monitor was yellow, so all the chicks were yellow ones). “How naked do you want her? You guys will pay me a soda for every time I beat her, right? Ah no, you’re the teacher, you have a salary! You pay a sandwich!”
Current algorithms have to be better than that crap, but I suspect that the main problem is the same as with the yellow chick or with card-counting and similar techniques: most people simply can’t concentrate long enough to be effective.
What makes him a mathematician, besides the reporter says so?
Andy Beal is a college dropout, a self-taught math genius, and one of the smartest investors in the country. With an expert eye for market movements, Beal made a tidy sum during the Great Recession, buying distressed assets while the nation’s biggest banks were getting taxpayer bailouts. Sensing weakness in credit markets leading up to the financial crisis, Beal virtually stopped making or buying loans from 2004 to 2007. When the financial sector blew up in 2008, he snatched beaten-down assets all over the country, including debt backed by a Houston refinery, a mortgage on an office building in Ohio and home loans from Alaska to Florida. More »
Nava, you have no idea how much I’m cringing at that story.
The following people have a degree in mathematics. I suspect most or all have a net worth of at least one million dollars:
Tom Lehrer, songwriter-parodist. Taught mathematics at Harvard.
Paul Vanhoeven, Hollywood film director. Phd in mathematics.
Brian May, Queen lead guitarist, Bsc mathematics and physics, PhD astrophysics.
Reed Hastings, CEO Netflix, BSc mathematics.
Art Garfunkel, musician, MA in mathematics from Columbia.
Danica McKellar, actress, BSc mathematics, summa cum laude.
Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, BSc mathematics
Donald Knuth, computer scientist, Phd mathematics
Story Musgrave, astronaut, medical doctor, worked as mathematician, BSc mathematics, MBA computer programming, BA chemistry, MD medicine, MSc biophysics, MA literature.
How do you get for here…
… to here?
The first one doesn’t even mention mathematicians.
FWIW, back in the sixties, we had a neighbor who was a professional math consultant and I know besides the suburban home, they owned a cabin in the mountains and a 50 ft sailboat which they kept at the Balboa Yacht Club. I’m sure his net worth was easily over a million dollars. They weren’t mega-rich but they lived quite well on his income.
But how many millionaires become mathematicians?
To clear up a minor point that has nothing to do with this thread and at the risk of being pedantic, telescope mirrors are usually coated in the observatory because of their size and difficulty in handling them and they are typically coated with aluminum not silver. The figure on the mirror will be correct when it arrives from the shop and does not need any “polishing” which would change the figure.
Anyone caught doing this would be hung from the top of the dome.
Heh, dude’s name is “Story.” What a loser.
Art Garfunkel?
Fine then … the “aluminizing vacuum chamber basement” … look, my job was to bring the pot and take shifts at the spotter 'scope … the rest was just details …
I picked this reference up off of Wikipedia though: “Mirror, Mirror”, an interesting walk-through on how they redo the Palomar 200" mirror.
Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman (designers of the RSA encryption algorithm) are surely all well beyond millionaire status by now. Cryptographers are specialized mathematicians.