> but these days for most people there’s little to no new maths.

You are right. For most people there's little to no new maths.

But not for all. There's still plenty of good quality math to be done in the exotics space. However, there's a bit of Catch 22 that prevents people from doing new math: all the big shops have had exotics libraries since before 2008, and because of the exotics hiatus between about 2008 and maybe 2013, the research momentum was lost. After that, most quants in the space were happy to find ways to use the old stuff, and apply small tweaks at the margins. Most small shops use vendor models (Numerix, Murex) or open source (QuantLib), and people who use vendor solutions or open source are not looking for cutting edge stuff.

But there's still good math left out there.