It’s taken as a given in our era that a high-level math mind—a “quant”—can find gainful employment. But that wasn’t always the case, and especially not in the world of elite mathematics in the early twentieth century. What was valued in the highest levels of mathematics had precious little application outside of it. Solutions to abstract problems won glory, and thus whole careers were devoted to chasing solutions to problems like the Riemann hypothesis, the Poincaré and Collatz conjectures, and Fermat’s last theorem. These were the math world’s greatest puzzles, and the fact that decades had
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