Comment by paulpauper

The intellectual level, complexity of research-level math is so great these days . Your kid has a greater chance of being a multi-millionaire NBA player than being smart enough to understand this stuff or do cutting-edge math research, compared to something like history or literature. As a field, modern mathematics is so far ahead of what laypeople can do but also even much of the field itself. It's like, imagine getting a PhD in math, which is a hard thing to do, and then multiply by a factor 100 in difficulty. Even 18th century math would be a challenge for many math grad students. Just crazy