The Logic Off Topic list

>>  > Mathematicians are very much artists.
>
>Some mathematicians, yes.  Most are however just plain dull 9-5 
>office workers. 

Oh come on! Just because you can't see the fruits of their labor, doesn't 
mean it isn't beautiful. Wasn't there one of my quotes that something 
like ... mathematics is like mountain climbing, ... only a select few are 
able to see certain mountain glaciers after a great amount of effort. 

Imagine hanging around a music studio .... if you were deaf. You might 
see a bunch of self-important weirdos and have no idea of what they were 
creating. In the same way, many math people look like wierdo's. Often 
sloppy in their dress. Sometimes their desks are piled in papers. 

But they create. The look at chaos and bring order to it. They find new 
ways of thinking. They find new methods of solution. Using only their 
wits .... and often their intuition and instinct they discover. Every 
paper in pure mathematics must be original - adding something new to 
human knowledge. (This is quite different in the sciences - where they 
publish dozens of times as many papers per researcher - to conduct an 
experiment even if the result is not clear, to verify another 
researcher's data or refute, etc. Science articles and math articles are 
as different as night and day!)

And, exactly like music, it becomes very addicting. They will spend all 
their free time fixated on a problem. Sometimes working for years without 
results - trying different lines of attack. And at the end - there are no 
gold records, no cheering crowds, ... , only a small group even 
understand what you've done.

For example, Wiles at Princeton, who solved Fermat's theorem after 300 
years in 1994...I heard that, at the time, less than 50 people in the 
world could understand the details of his work. But I'm sure he got a 
high from it. His name will go down in history.