Theodore von Kármán—the Hungarian aerodynamicist who established the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, built the first supersonic wind tunnel, assumed the first chairmanship of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, and “invented consulting,” according to von Neumann—remembers how “a well-known Budapest banker came to see me with his seventeen-year-old son…. He had an unusual request. He wanted me to dissuade young Johnny from becoming a mathematician. ‘Mathematics,’ he said, ‘does not make money.’”
