How to cope with the fact that I will never become a great mathematician?

Maths also contributes to the progress, just in an indirect way.

A shitty engineer can produce more value than a shitty mathematician

An hero.

But a great mathematitian can produce more value than a great engeneer.

But how valuable is that value? Not very. It still holds so little meaning as to be totally meaningless. It's like saying a store clerk contributes to the progress of humankind by providing a great mathematician with the goods he wants or needs. Meh

memorize all the vocabulary words for the GRE

Find something you find fun or if you can't seem to be the only two options

You can OP, just keep trying

You too

Feynman was a brainlet

But you're not a great mathematician :^)

Don't fall for the "only major breakthroughs are a contribution" meme. Small time mathematicians tease out fine details and carry on the tradition. There aren't enough Abels or Gausses born to do that by themselves.

This

You don't, you keep working hard and believe you will. Life is not about getting your goals, but about having them. Having a reason to wake up every morning is more valuable than ever achieving your dreams.

Never look for a way to cope if it means leaving your dreams behind, it won't work. Goals creates positive emotion, you cannot live sane without them.

easy, just become a physicist instead :^)

The ant hill idea of progress.

I don't know about math, but as far as I can tell, science at least, has become too vast for a single person to make a significant contribution any longer. What's troubling though is that the stamp-collecting variety of science, at least, is poised to be automated away. So not only will individual small time scientists contribute very little, their work might not even be needed. This is what STEM will have to contend with in the not too distant future.

Soundest advice I have seen in these threads.

It sounds sappy, but people need hope to live.

Aren't most STEM jobs in service and design/manufacturing?

I wasn't really talking about employment. More about the pace of scientific discovery.

it's about the journey, not the destination

Understand man is not a machine
He needs a service and a purpose and a reason for being

tfw no goals

>A small-time mathemtaician can't really contribute anything.

Yes you can. You might not solve P \neq NP but you can discover a new numerical method that solves a certain type of sparse matrices much faster than current methods. Then some senior engineer will be cursing your name when they couldn't get their stupid MATLAB code to return the correct upper bound.

>Small time mathematicians tease out fine details and carry on the tradition.

Also the great mathematicians build on the work of others. They are educated and guided by those others and even their work is probably built on the work of lesser mathematicians.

>Having a reason to wake up every morning is more valuable than ever achieving your dreams.

This is true. I am depressed and miserable but having a goal gives my life structure. I know I can go down that rabbit hole of utter desperation if I don't focus on my work.

You don't need a degree to do what you love... Join the ham radio guys if radio waves are your thing. No need to become a physicist.
Easier with maths since it is a solitary thing.

They're saying you rely on people recognition because you expect there is "good enough value" to seem valuable. Except if you add ten years, 100 years or 1000 years to your created value, it evaporates. At any case, you will be forgotten.
That's why the store clerk is almost as valuable as Einstein. Maybe not on a 10 or 100 years scale, but give it a little time, and dust is just dust.

>Everything evaporates
This. This absurdist stuff right here is what I refuse to ever believe. I need to believe we do things for a reason and it will not be in vain. And it's the reason why it's NOT about recognition.

Consider that you'll never be a great artist, musician, writer, philosopher, scientist, surgeon, or car mechanic either.

In other words, perspective.

Has there ever been a person who became great at all of those things?

Think of it this way even if you became Terry Tao or Michozuki still hardly anybody would know you. Just do math because you like doing it, it's that simple.

GRE verbal is the easiest shit. No need to memorize anything.

Da Vinci? Except for car mechanic.

>>
>I won't be a great mathematician either. But you know what? Who gives a shit. I will get my Ph.D, and then find work at some backwoods university and have a pretty chill live nonetheless.
this
hedonists just want to have fun, like women chasing their harmless fun

No one is telling you to believe it as it is a fact. But realize that you get to pick one thing as important and live your life according to it, yet it isn't important by most metrics. That's why "being great at..." can't be a thing you valuate according to others/society/whatever. You only can be the foundation of its value. It's a personal, most important truth, not a universal one.

instead of crying how about trying?

thats why im so fucked up thanks man now i get it.

>doing autocad instead of the other 300 low end engineer applicant who didn't get the job

ok mon

Why would you want to be?

Working on professional-level pure math sounds like hell.

Just ask people what they think i'm good at
This encourages me
P.s. lol,pic with russian
Are you from RF?

Agreed dude
u r reading my thoughts

Phenibut inhaler would be pretty cool, why glycine though?