> how might you contribute to humanity, and even deeper, to the well-being of the world, by pursuing mathematics I cannot begin to express how much I disagree with this. Mathematics should fight child abuse? And artists enlist in the military to fight despots overseas, by way of art?? Mathematics should be an end in itself. You should be a mathematician, or a stand-up comic, or a painter because it fulfills you , bec…
IMO Bill Thurston is saying people are people first and mathematicians second. People often feel the need to contribute to the world and mathematicians often wonder how they can do it through mathematics. And of course he says it's not easy to answer that. There's nothing wrong in trying to pursue mathematics to improve some aspect of the world. There are millions of way in which pursuing mathematics can improve the…
I'm currently reading "How Not to Be Wrong" by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg; here's what he has to say about his calling:
"Pure mathematics can be a kind of convent, a quiet place safely cut off from the pernicious influences of the world's messiness and inconsistency. I grew up inside those walls. Other math kids I knew were tempted by applications to physics, or genomics, or the black art of hedge fund management, but I wanted no such rumspringa. As a graduate student, I dedicated myself to number theory, what Gauss called "the queen of mathematics," the purest of the pure subjects, the sealed garden at the center of the convent, where we contemplated the same questions about numbers and equations that troubled the Greeks and have gotten hardly less vexing in the twenty-five hundred years since.
"At first I worked on number theory with a classical flavor, proving facts about sums of fourth powers of whole numbers that I could, if pressed, explain to my family at Thanksgiving, even if I couldn't explain how I proved what I proved. But before long I got enticed into even more abstract realms, investigating problems where the basic actors— "residually modular Galois representations," "cohomology of moduli schemes," "dynamical systems on homogeneous spaces," things like that—were impossible to talk about outside the archipelago of seminar halls and faculty lounges that stretches from Oxford to Princeton to Kyoto to Paris to Madison, Wisconsin, where I'm a professor now. When I tell you this stuff is thrilling, and meaningful, and beautiful, and that I'll never get tired of thinking about it, you may just have to believe me, because it takes a long education just to get to the point where the objects of study rear into view."
Maths appeal rests in it being a "sealed garden at the center of the convent". One should do math because this sealed garden brings you peace, because you belong there.