Name: Anonymous 2009-12-01 11:12
How many pages of math research is published each year?
Think of all those journals. It would be impossible to keep up to speed in all areas of math, even if you just read journals all day. How much of the research published is actually interesting or important? Are there just too many mathematicians these days, all doing mediocre research just to make a living? Instead of working on the big problems in math, they find a really boring and obscure area to research, where they can find new theorems, because nobody else cares to do so?
Is this what academia is like? Should the number of academics be cut by 10 so we only have brilliant minds doing actual interesting research?
Please enlighten me, grad students, and researchers.
Think of all those journals. It would be impossible to keep up to speed in all areas of math, even if you just read journals all day. How much of the research published is actually interesting or important? Are there just too many mathematicians these days, all doing mediocre research just to make a living? Instead of working on the big problems in math, they find a really boring and obscure area to research, where they can find new theorems, because nobody else cares to do so?
Is this what academia is like? Should the number of academics be cut by 10 so we only have brilliant minds doing actual interesting research?
Please enlighten me, grad students, and researchers.