Math for Its Own Sake

Beauty, usefulness, and the math that pays

I’ve never written an article like this, and I don’t even know where to start, so I’m just gonna start typing and see how this turns out.

I’ve been into science and money as long as I can remember. I got into gamedev when I was 9 and really enjoyed that, and a main motivator was making a hugely popular game like Minecraft and becoming rich. Eventually, I would drop gamedev, but it was my first ever introduction to coding.

My dad used to run a small eBay shop selling car parts, so after I was done with gamedev I figured I could try selling some stuff too! I would buy used shit cheaply wherever I could find it. Cameras, Disney mugs, printers, typewriters, whatever I could get my hands on. My dad would let me sell the stuff through his eBay account since, keep in mind, I was like 12 years old at that time. But other than access to his account, I was on my own, and it was the first money I ever made. And I got HOOKED.

I figured out pretty fast what would sell quickly and what wouldn’t, and eventually settled on the niche of selling brand printers and HiFi audio equipment. But constantly having eBay Kleinanzeigen (the German equivalent of Craigslist, which belonged to eBay at the time but nowadays seems to be its own thing) open on another monitor and constantly looking for deals was annoying. So I wrote my first real bot that would constantly scan the site and send me any desirable resellable stuff to my phone. In the process, I also discovered a bug on the site that would let me see the listings 1-2 minutes before they were visible on the site, which allowed me to buy up pretty much anything I wanted, and when I moved to university, it was also what allowed me to find accommodation in just 2 days.

I did that for a while, but it was tedious, and printers were messy, so I eventually stopped. But I loved the idea behind automation and making money while doing nothing, so I was looking for something new. And eventually, at the age of 14, I stumbled upon ✨Daytrading✨. My first ever trade was some stupidly levered 50EUR position on a forex pair that doubled within a few hours, and I think that one trade might have genuinely changed my life. Like when a junky wins big for the first time in a casino. After this trade came a period of chart patterns, indicators, gurus, and trading courses.

It was fun, and I felt like the smartest person on the planet, but it was still too manual. While doing all of this reselling and trading, I was still very interested in science! I would play with stupidly dangerous high-voltage transformers that would kill me before I hit the ground, or store chemicals together that, if mixed, would cause the entire apartment building to get evacuated. So then this love for science, automation, and trading all combined into a (probably) lifelong pursuit of quantitative finance.

I had just discovered my biggest passion in life, and ever since then it’s all I’ve been doing almost all day every day. I would literally skip school to read Sinclair’s books! And yes, like every aspiring quant, I would start with pairs trading and the like, and yes, like every aspiring quant, I would get cocky and think I’m the smartest human to ever walk the earth, but hey, we’ve all been there. We live and we learn, right?

So I kept doing quant as a hobby for a few years until I finally turned 18, when my life started changing quite a bit. I had just moved to Munich to pursue a degree in mathematics (this is gonna become important), and had just lost thousands of dollars that were parked on FTX, but that’s also when I got my first job as a Quant! Throughout the entire degree, I would work as a quant while doing the absolute minimum to pass the degree, because Quant makes money, and math doesn’t.

Then I started my master's, and something in me began to shift. I always thought I wouldn’t be doing a PhD, since I could be working and making money instead of doing academic research, so the master’s is gonna be my final degree, so I might as well finish with close to a perfect grade. I also figured that since I won’t be doing a PhD, I should try to self-publish a strong paper as a signal to top firms. And the thing is… I’ve been really enjoying it.

This brings me to the heart of this article, and the reason I’m writing it at all.

Whenever I came across something interesting or beautiful in mathematics, I’d remind myself that it wouldn’t make me money, and that I should go work on something that would. So for my entire career, math was a toolbox: something I used to extract money from markets.

But a tension has been building in me for a long time. On one side, I want to make as much money as possible and spend every minute moving toward that goal. On the other, I genuinely love mathematics. I love its beauty, and I love solving problems, even when they don’t lead anywhere near a profit.

I think it’s finally time to accept this, so I’ve made a decision. For the past few months, I’ve been working in a senior quant role, the best-paying job I’ve ever had. So I did the most reasonable thing someone can do in this situation (or not) and quit! I’ve got savings that can carry me for years, and one day I WILL be making a fuck ton of money, but today, and in the near future, I want to give this genuine desire to do math and to solve problems, just for the sake of it, a try.

This doesn’t mean I’m leaving quant finance. Quite the opposite. I’m writing two papers right now, both on problems I ran into myself while doing my job, and most of the math I’m drawn to is connected to markets anyway.

I’m done min-maxing math. From now on, I’m doing math for its own sake (He said the title!).