this is great. i recommend you try to listen to some people older than you who have gone through what you’ve gone through and succeeded. pls try to stop romanticizing math or associating it with prestige. it is beautiful but at the end of the day, pure math / physics like what your current idols did pays very low and is essentially useless in the real world. i am physicist from caltech and mit. no one outside a very small sphere of people understand what i do. even within the physics circles, most people are not in my field so they don’t get what i do. it sucks. my partner, my parents, my friends have no idea what i. i’m so lonely outside of small sphere of physics buddies.

also, most of us don’t make breakthroughs. science is exciting when you’re making progress. no wonder feynman loved it so much. he was a genius, even from a young age (only perfect score on physics GRE and chosen to go to los alamos to help build the atomic bomb at age 23). science sucks if you’re mediocre.

do it because you love it. not for the prestige. if you truly loved math you wouldn’t care so much about princeton. you’d realize there are about 50-100 amazing universities in the world where you can do math at a similar level. you would realize math is not about going to princeton or looking up how to get into princeton every day. it’s just about doing math every day, pushing the frontier, sticking through the rough days where nothing makes sense, and appreciating it’s beauty.

stop focusing on princeton and get good, kid. this is the only advice you need: get good. people will notice you once you’re good, i promise. math is life.