Is this a joke?

Personal motivation is a complex thing. Is it worthy to spend most of our life proving x=y or anything else? It’s a valid question, and the answer is not an automatic yes.

Du Sautoy is a softy! I’d throw such students out of the window…

Why is that?

Ohh, but it is not a matter on which the main point you should be in research is, but on which the main point you are in research is. Same thing happen with secondary school teachers: they should be doing that job because of a passion for education, but most of them do it because it is an stable, reasonably well paid job, with sound holidays.

And, we both know that we chose research because of the travelling, the free food, the beer (and the women, of course!). I see that you’ve turned to the dark side now… Is that goatee a part of your devious plan to take over the world? I always thought you’d go for a moustache and a monocle, as a good traditionalist

Well, with the possible exception of Paris (and they carefully solved that by pushing the -math monastery- IHES in Bures sur Yvette and not any closer to… well, anywhere), all these places are so frickin’ boring that it is hard to find anything to do! No surprise that people end up doing some good math… how can you possibly get distrcted from math if pubs close at 11.00 pm!? luckily for my mental health, Köln is just half an hour away.

It is funny that you mention the thing about paragraphs that have the look and feel of being copied from the books mentioned above, recently I’ve been feeling the same thing while reading some (several, meaning like a dozen) papers, even from different authors. From a pragmatical point of view, the faster I can get throu’ them, the better, but I wonder if some “sentences” are becoming sort of mantras that people jut go repeating over and over again, till the point they lost their original meaning (if any).

[quote post="396"]Du Sautoy is a softy! I’d throw such students out of the window…[/quote]

Maybe you should consider moving your office to the ground floor then? As cynical as it might sound, I think the real question the student was asking was something like “why should I put so much effort on such a low-paid job, which almost surely will oblige me to move from one city to another for several years before getting any stability, instead of moving to “the city” and trade stocks for ten times the salary?”

Hell, I hang out with pre/postdocs all the time, and I’d dare to say that over 90% have no clear plans even for the next year, and almost all agree that main point for being in research is because it is an easy-going job (no timetables, no boss looking behind your shoulder, relative freedom to choose what you wanna do), but don’t wanna keep this “write some dumb research project, get recommendation letters, apply for the next math institute in the list” thing going on for too long. Is this nightmare that drives us crazy and make us ask ourselves “what’s the point?”, so please go easy on us