Karol Krizka

This is what Ian Stewart has to say on the profession of a mathematician in his book, Letters to a Young Mathematician:

“Some careers seem to accumulate people who might easily have preferred to do something else. You will run into people who tell you that they practice law as a day job but they are really novelists or playwrights or jazz trombonists. Other people can’t settle on something, or they see their careers in more purely practical terms, and they drift into human resources management or advertising sales. Which is not to say that these people are not dedicated or fulfilled in what they do, but few of them consider their work a calling. No one drifts into being a mathematician.”

I think that he brings out a good point, that some people just consider their job as a necessity for living, but that’s all. However that is not the outlook that a mathematician has on his career because of the dedication that it requires. Reading that book made me want to switch to the Mathematical Physics program and I would suggest reading it for anyone going into a math related field.