TITLE: What does "working mathematician" mean?
QUESTION [10 upvotes]: What does "working mathematician" mean? Is this term derogatory? What properties of a "working mathematician" are considered undesirable, and what attitude contrasts them?

REPLY [3 votes]: I was trained as a mathematician but work in industry on algorithms, usually of a probabilistic inference or machine learning flavor.  I rarely publish, but for what it's worth, I still think of myself as a "working mathematician".