I asked a professor about this. She’s works at the University of Chicago, in philosophy, but she’s friends with a math professor she met as a grad student at Berkeley. Here’s what she said, so far as I remember it:
The selection process for math programs, at least at Berkeley, was a little funny. It wasn’t so hard to get into the program, but there was a very serious filter, a set of exams, about half way through that weeded about 50% of people out. If you passed that, you could go on to get the PhD, but even then, you really need to prove something to finish. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit though, so you don’t have to be super-genius or anything.
Once you get onto the job market, you are filtered for a lot of non-math skills. These are skills having to do with the upkeep of the profession: teaching, being a conscientious faculty member, etc. You’re also expected to write well and clearly.
I asked if this caused math talent to go to waste:
It might. Empirically, its very hard to say, since undeveloped talent is probably invisible. But remember that good math departments get hundreds and hundreds of applications every year for no more than a dozen positions. Most of the time, they don’t have to make trade offs: they can just go for people who are talented and good writers. There just isn’t money to fund all the strictly mathematically talented people, especially if they need the support of writers. Also, I doubt the really off the chart brilliant people ever get excluded for anything like writing ability, though they tend to be good writers too.
So what I took away from this was 1) I was wrong in thinking that math departments don’t care about math-extrinsic skills. 2) I was wrong to think these don’t filter people out. It hadn’t occurred to me that there is more mathematical talent than there is money to develop it. It seems like the problem with academia is kind of just a lack of funding.
EDIT: I might as well add that, needless to say, writing ability was considered important to philosophy too, and a filter at every level, but that’s not surprising. She didn’t have anything to tell me about physics.
It hadn’t occurred to me that there is more mathematical talent than there is money to develop it. It seems like the problem with academia is kind of just a lack of funding.
As it happens, a few months ago I saw an interesting paper examining the consequence of the fall of Soviet Russia and the subsequent exodus of top Russian mathematicians (with all their unique results and methods, obscure to the West) into the US. The upshot was that the effect was to push out of academia a lot of lower-ranked American mathematicians—it turned out to be a zero-sum environment… “The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians”
It has been difficult to open up the black box of knowledge production. We use unique international data on the publications, citations, and affiliations of mathematicians to examine the impact of a large post‐1992 influx of Soviet mathematicians on the productivity of their American counterparts. We find a negative productivity effect on those mathematicians whose research overlapped with that of the Soviets. We also document an increased mobility rate (to lower‐quality institutions and out of active publishing) and a reduced likelihood of producing “home run” papers. Although the total product of the pre‐existing American mathematicians shrank, the Soviet contribution to American mathematics filled in the gap. However, there is no evidence that the Soviets greatly increased the size of the “mathematics pie.” Finally, we find that there are significant international differences in the productivity effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that these international differences can be explained by both differences in the size of the émigré flow into the various countries and in how connected each country is to the global market for mathematical publications.
I asked a professor about this. She’s works at the University of Chicago, in philosophy, but she’s friends with a math professor she met as a grad student at Berkeley. Here’s what she said, so far as I remember it:
I asked if this caused math talent to go to waste:
So what I took away from this was 1) I was wrong in thinking that math departments don’t care about math-extrinsic skills. 2) I was wrong to think these don’t filter people out. It hadn’t occurred to me that there is more mathematical talent than there is money to develop it. It seems like the problem with academia is kind of just a lack of funding.
EDIT: I might as well add that, needless to say, writing ability was considered important to philosophy too, and a filter at every level, but that’s not surprising. She didn’t have anything to tell me about physics.
As it happens, a few months ago I saw an interesting paper examining the consequence of the fall of Soviet Russia and the subsequent exodus of top Russian mathematicians (with all their unique results and methods, obscure to the West) into the US. The upshot was that the effect was to push out of academia a lot of lower-ranked American mathematicians—it turned out to be a zero-sum environment… “The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians”