Post #485

I put five or six years of my life into that[stable commutator lenght question]. I even wrote a book about that. But no one cared. There were maybe one or two people in the world who built on my work, but it was basically just crickets. So I was very disappointed. And I stopped working on it, not because I’d exhausted the subject, or because I didn’t think there were interesting things to work on, but just because it was lonely to keep doing it by myself and get no reaction. But there was a good lesson to come out of it, which is, I ended up caring a little bit less what other people think, and am driven much more by curiosity alone. If you want to go into mathematics, doing the mathematics itself has to be the thing that’s the reward, because no one cares, and what’s considered important doesn’t always make sense.