It's more like opera. Math has always been opera.
replyDo rich people like opera? Yes. Is that a profit motive? No... but it's a shibboleth for wanting to be rich. Do you get it?
It's ridiculous to say, no profit motive in mathematics. It's like saying, no profit motive in LISP. But cmon, you think the Collison brother who took Math 55 and liked LISP: I know that in a pedantic sense what you mean. But in terms of academic departments where people say they are no interested in money and it turns out they want to become billionaires... Math Department ranks pretty highly. Always has.
I agree that being technically gifted has been a great way to make boatloads of cash in the past few decades, and that this correlates with being good at math. But I don’t see why this implies that enjoying math means someone is more money-minded than others. If anything, the students in pure math departments are intentionally forgoing the potential cash conferred by their technical abilities in favor of the academic pursuit. In anticipation of a reply observing that math PhDs regularly go into quant, I counter that quant programs reach out to interview students in many other fields, and more to the point, spending half a decade studying algebraic number theory is surely not even close to an efficient way to build wealth.
In response to your second point: even if mathematicians desired wealth more than other professionals, how does this demonstrate the existence of some kind of profit motive in math?
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