eyes full of stars - by Rachel Chen - eyes full of stars

Why do people dedicate their lives to mathematics, an area with minimal real-life applications, a small community, and a high-stress environment? Because they like math. Well, why do people like math? Many people in the math olympiad community like math due to the problem solving. They like working for hours on a problem and the feeling of finally cracking it. I love this feeling too, but is it really enough to justify spending decades of time on it? Especially since math research isn’t like math olympiads–often, there isn’t a nice solution, and problems take magnitudes longer than a few hours. People also like olympiads for the feeling of winning. People universally enjoy hard work paying off and the feeling of being one of the small percentage of people with some accomplishment. However, if one is motivated by winning, even if they are very talented, going onto math research seems suboptimal. Math research is exploring and staring and banging your head against the desk with rare glim

Why do people dedicate their lives to mathematics, an area with minimal real-life applications, a small community, and a high-stress environment? Because they like math. Well, why do people like math? Many people in the math olympiad community like math due to the problem solving. They like working for hours on a problem and the feeling of finally cracking it. I love this feeling too, but is it really enough to justify spending decades of time on it? Especially since math research isn’t like math olympiads–often, there isn’t a nice solution, and problems take magnitudes longer than a few hours