Very interesting! I used to walk through the McGill campus in the 70s with my dad, and I got an undergraduate degree in pure math from Carleton later, and had intended to go to graduate school - but didn't, I went to New York City and had a fantastic thirty year adventure instead.

And my reasoning was the same as yours. I realized that the two areas I was most interested in, model theory and topology, had fairly recent gone through a revolution, but now seemed to have gone very far into technicality, and that further progress was going to be slow and niche.

And also, many of my questions had been answered! I realized that complex analysis was a "perfect" system; I understood Gödel's work, and enough model theory to full understand Robinson's infinitesimals. I understood why you couldn't square the circle, and trisect the angle, and duplicate the cube. I understood point set topology and saw how the different geometries were the study of different invariants.

I never regretted studying mathematics, and I never regretted not going on, either.

There are two things I vaguely regret not really learning, one being Maxwell's Equations and the other Nöther's two Theorems (which I never even heard about until long after I left school!)

But I feel a couple of weeks would get me Maxwell's Equations, there are probably a bunch of books that would work as a single text, and I simply have been too busy tinkering with computer programs and having fun outside my room...

Thanks for a thought-provoking article, keep it up.