Mathematicians are odd birds. At my undergrad university, there was only one library allowed to have smoking and ashtrays - the math library. We had a LAVISH and quite prestigious math department - they had I believe the largest building on the entire massive campus which has a lot of big and tall buildings. About 90 percent of the math grad students and postdocs I knew smoked.
My best friend lived in a campus apartment with his wife and infant son (and later a daughter and two more sons). His neighbor was a grad student who was writing his these. My friend came home one day for lunch and noticed his neighbor laying on the chaise lounge ~OUTT back sunning himself with dark sunglasses, a Speedo, a lemonade, and a pack of smokes and a lighter. My buddy commented "hay, I thought you were supposed to be working on your thesis?" to which the math dude responded "I am. Don't bother me now, I'm right in the middle of something. If you want to talk, come over later tonight."
I have/had a friend who was a dude kind of like Will Hunting, butt only in math & physics. He and I took parallel courses for awhile. We hit differential equations (not the simple ordinary ones in third semester calculus) butt the Diff Eq course together. Diff Eq is basically a cookbook class - you are taught how to categorize differential equations and then apply cookbook methods (procedures) to solve them based on their type. Sometimes you are shown a derivation or proof of how the method was produced, butt a lot of times it's very hard to follow and a lot of times there is no comprehensible proof or derivation of the formula. My friend could skip the derivation/proof and in almost every case just "see" why a method worked. I asked him to explain some of these to me and he tried and I simply couldn't follow how he was doing it - butt he was. He just "saw" that kind of stuff.
In biology courses the best he could ever pull was a B-/C+ - he couldn't follow that type of thinking. It wasn't mathematical enough at the undergrad stage for him to "get" it. I've seen several like this - outstanding at math and physics and can't do organic chemistry, etc.
Math guys (and they are like 90 percent male at the graduate level in the top schools - or used to be even recently) are just different.
My friend went on to his Ph.D. in Physics and then wrote the geoseismic modelling software for Shell and lived in the Netherlands.
Now, there are exceptions also. I had a client who was a Ph.D. in math from a top university. He decided that he wanted to apply his math to some practical problem for his postdoc, so he did a postdoc at NIH doing programming for molecular modelling of a certain type of proteins which are incredibly important as drugs - especially after him. While he was doing this postdoc, in his "spare time" he wrote a DNA sequence analysis package for the IBM-PC computer - which he licensed to a big company and was sold for awhile until superceded by competing packages built by TEAMS of programmers and which were more robust and ran on VAXs both faster and with more memory available for alignment algorithms. Now, after his postdoc on modelling these proteins, he came to SiliValley and a business-savvy fellow organized a company around designing those proteins and creating drugs. He became fabulously wealthy and now lives in Incline Village, NV. Many drugs created by others using his methods and software and two created directly by him in conjunction with other scientists at the company are now in the marketplace. They are some of the biggest sellers around and you see their ads on TV (for at least two of them).
He lived in an apartment across from Stanford Medical Center on Sand Hill Road - a one-bedroom (he was single). When I first met him, he'd come back from playing tennis. He gott ~OUTT of his car wearing orange shorts and black dress socks with his white court shoes. The BOD of the company essentially forced him to sell $10 million of his stock so that he would not manage the company from a fear of losing it all. He's now worth a quarter of a billion. He also bought his first house with the proceeds from that first stock sale of $10 million, butt he only did it for the tax advantages. He lived in only about half the house and had minimal furniture. His one splurge was a Porsche Turbo Carrera.
Two math guys - two different routes. Both very "unusual" characters.
Math folks are way different. They just are.
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