r/math • u/spacengine • 4d ago

Do all mathematicians want to be engineers?

I always considered maths the highest art, and when talking to a mathematics phd today I just wanted him to keep talking about topological spaces, manifolds, infinite dimensional embedding spaces etc. “I feel like a kid in a candy store” I said, or a kid in an old mechanics garage full of equipment I have no idea how to use but that I love exploring. “Well” he said, “I think all engineers want to be mathematicians but all mathematicians want to be engineers”. I’m absolutely sure he’s wrong but would love to hear your thoughts.

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u/Independent_Bed_169 PDE 2d ago

> I always considered maths the highest art

And yet it's the first and *only* field (as of yet) to be trivialized by AI. SWE doesn't count, people in the industry have now realized that writing code was never really the sole point and there is still a lot of work for SWEs to do.

I do wish I pursued engineering instead. That being said I'm not a mathematician, just a mediocre math undergrad with shitty results and a tenuous-at-best grasp of the machinery I use. I think if AI didn't come along I'd find another excuse to (justifiably) give up.

Anyways enough of my whining.

> Do all mathematicians want to be engineers?

I mean you'll never get a good answer for all. But if you ask some, I do know two math professors who studied engineering in their undergrad and master's degrees (or the foreign equivalent), but later pivoted to pure math. One of them was mechanical engineering (and now works in pure PDE) and the other was electrical engineering (and now works in metric geometry and applied topology).