Mathematician in 1545: Cardano publishes the cubic — and ignites a feud

Do you need a PhD to be a mathematician? For research and university positions, yes, effectively everywhere: the PhD is the credential that proves you can produce new mathematics. Outside academia the picture is looser — trading firms, tech companies and government agencies hire strong bachelor's and master's graduates — and unlike medicine or law, nothing legally stops anyone from proving theorems without any degree. Ramanujan never completed one.

Sector matters far more than seniority. US mathematicians earned a median of about $116,000 in 2023 (BLS); a full professor in Germany typically earns roughly €80,000–110,000; a junior CNRS researcher in France starts near €30,000. The outliers are in finance, where senior quantitative researchers at top trading firms can clear several times a professor's salary — a small, selective slice of the profession.

AI systems reached gold-medal level on International Mathematical Olympiad problems in 2025, and proof assistants like Lean can now verify research-level arguments. What machines still cannot do is decide which questions matter, invent the definitions that make a problem tractable, or carry responsibility for mathematical meaning. Most researchers expect the job to be transformed — closer to working with a powerful collaborator — rather than eliminated.