As class attendance steadily thins, the workload does not. The first few problem sets each take about 40 hours to complete. The work burden is reason enough for many extraordinarily gifted students to drop.
Case in point: Ameya A. Velingker ’10 took Advanced Placement calculus his freshman year and ranked in the top 12 for the USA Math Olympiad the year after that. “It was a tough decision to drop,” Velingker says. “You’re around all these people who are beasts at math. But I realized it was not going to work out.”
You have to love this stuff and have no life outside of it. These folks are out of my league.
You have to love this stuff and have no life outside of it.
That's more often true than not. But then there's Euler:
Euler was the most prolific mathematical writer of all times finding time (even with his 13 children) to publish over 800 papers in his lifetime.
Euler was able to do original mathematics while bouncing a baby on his knee...