Perelman resigned from his research post in Steklov Institute of Mathematics and in 2006 stated that he had quit professional mathematics, owing to feeling disappointed over the ethical standards in the field. >
Anybody have any idea what the ethical standards might be that he’s referring to? Not sure if there’s a scandal or something or just an overall sense of displeasure with the field.
Yeah, there was some background drama with his parent institution, if I remember correctly. He didn’t have enough money to fly anywhere, his institution refused to donate and he was too embarrassed to ask elsewhere. Or something like that.
Not from that field, and I think it depends a lot of the field, country, etc, but research is not an idilic world at all and deal with huge flaws from the real world, institutions, society and economics, not aside of human being’s flaws, so it can be deeply disappointing in some aspects. I believe is a natural in any guild (there is shit everywhere, e.g. police require internal affairs for a good reason, but not only, they suffer from funding restrictions, metrics for promotion, etc, and the same can be said for medicine, politics, etc) so in the end it may be your ability to deal with real world shit… and luck.
From the wiki article :
Anybody have any idea what the ethical standards might be that he’s referring to? Not sure if there’s a scandal or something or just an overall sense of displeasure with the field.
Just speculating, maybe it has to do with belonging to Russian academia.
Yeah, there was some background drama with his parent institution, if I remember correctly. He didn’t have enough money to fly anywhere, his institution refused to donate and he was too embarrassed to ask elsewhere. Or something like that.
Not from that field, and I think it depends a lot of the field, country, etc, but research is not an idilic world at all and deal with huge flaws from the real world, institutions, society and economics, not aside of human being’s flaws, so it can be deeply disappointing in some aspects. I believe is a natural in any guild (there is shit everywhere, e.g. police require internal affairs for a good reason, but not only, they suffer from funding restrictions, metrics for promotion, etc, and the same can be said for medicine, politics, etc) so in the end it may be your ability to deal with real world shit… and luck.
Keep reading. It’s in the “Possible withdrawal from mathematics” section.