>>13421850>>13422472I have even co-authored publications with some, including one (skipped gradschool to start his own very successful company) who established Professors have called a "genius mathematician" (he isn't by /sci/'s standards btw).
HOWEVER, for every success story I know, I also know 20 failures. There is a big difference between people who never got into gradschool and people who never could get into gradschool under the best of circumstances. Many of the latter are extremely naive and have very schizo ideas that are "not even wrong" (i.e. irrelevant to everyone). It gets ugly in this domain. You have people who think they're an unrecognised genius for doing 1st year textbook problems. Then there are those people in the grey areas who are semi-professional researchers. These are for example friends who finished their bachelors and got rejected from gradschools, but still wanted to be researchers. Many of them are even able to garner some private funding, but quickly find it's not enough to live on. In general I think the real reason people fail is very high expectations coupled with high living costs of cities. They get one good idea and think it's their ticket, but of course the world doesn't work like that. The common trends are secrecy, isolation, ego and lack of clear presentation (often, but not always due to ego they do not bother learning clear presentation skills essential to research). To take it back to Heaviside he published in the public domain, and companies patented his ideas. They even offered him money, but he refused to take it because he thought the entire patent should be his (which it shouldn't since the patented parts were new developments). He should've taken the money here and worked with the company.
But in any case he was happy. He didn't live in the city, and he could write and produce research more cheaply in the countryside.
