I'm a 26-year-old supervisor in the social work field, and I'm searching for a path to Mathmagicland.

I taught math to classmates in middle school, excelled at Calculus in high school, lost my way in college (where I earned a B.S. in Business Administration), but still managed to score a 760 on the Quantitative Reasoning and a 790 on the Analytical portion after not taking any math courses since my first semester in college. I never truly gave up math -- since graduating in 2001, I've assisted friends with debt management, worked on logic puzzles, and worked on math problems in old textbooks (for fun!!!). Last fall, I helped a friend study on the LSAT and became addicted to the analytical games section. I also began writing and submitting logic puzzles to puzzle magazines. I would like to pursue a graduate degree in pure mathematics, but I'm worried that I'm way behind my age group, and I don't quite know where to begin. I've bought some books to "reteach" myself calculus, and I intend to advance from there.

Do people become mathematicians this late in the game? Can someone offer any advice?

I was just wondering what are the average Mathematics Subject GRE scores of accepted graduate students in different universities.  I have looked on the Internet, but I haven't found any information on this.  I would be really grateful if someone could point me in the right direction for this information.

From taking the Math GREs, I have noticed that the top score (and the upper 90% percentile) is quite hard to get, even if you are fairly well grounded in the subject.  (My main problem with the test is running out of time.) Is this because a lot of post-grads are taking the test, or are there other reasons?

Any information would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Ben

I am almost three years into a PhD program for math with two to three years left.

What I am wondering is if I should switch to a PhD program in education or stay with one in math?

A prof assigns a very difficult problem to a graduate student and then asks how its going a couple days later. The student has made some progress, is on the right track but not finished.

Which answer is better? Which would you give? Which would you prefer to get? If something in between, give an alternate response:

1) I spent 6 hours working on a problem and came up with a couple ideas and only one worth mentioning and its not firm but here it is...

2) I only had a few minutes to glance at the problem. Here's an idea...

What adjectives would you use to describe each student in a letter of recommendation?

Do you think different faculty prefer different responses depending on their institution/nationality/sex?

Would you go so far as to suggest a student be dishonest and answer (1) vs (2)? Do you think many students are dishonest about this?